yates worst thing/burt... · web viewmedia in much ado about nothing—noting and marking—and in...
TRANSCRIPT
Destruction matters, but not the means. Prospero’s use of the “drown” to destroy his books does not invite editorial commentary.
Everyone wants to fill in the blanks--which books did he have? Did he have a magic book?
Repetition, cruxes not called as such. Structure of difference within and without difference generates repetition that is not compulsive but are semantic rather than part of a linear plot.
Mowat passages1
2 filmsTaymor and Greenaway
Then get into oddities of both. Moving the text—only staff from above—epilogue transferred. End titles. Prospero’s mirror shatters, water, burns, hisses like acid.
. Difference between script in P’s Books and film; no paratexts of books in Tyamor’s film. Epilogue not delivered by Prospera, but along with rather than before, as Mowat thinks, the epilogue. Greenaway puts the stff breaking after the book. He doens’;t bury it—it swims away on the surface.
Paratexts.The end title sequence has titles, not the book.What is the relation between book and film ? What is a book without a paratext?
Then get back to the way drown is part of a cluster of cruxes we want to open examine through the films. They both leave the cruxes open. Ook dorwn, people drowning. The play is about biobibliopolitics—rezones the island as an uncertain space-- and archive management. Mowat opens the cruxes only to close them off. Here we depart from NW criticism and deconstruction.
Then get from the crux into the elliptical structure of the play as opposed to a play with ellipses, self-deconstructing oppositions between drowning nad hanging, between a wreck and abandon ship, between sinking and burning a ship. Btewen death by burial and Reading is not Prospero or Prospera centric. Nor Prospero and Caliban. Bring in phantasm and survivance.Then get into Greenaway. Then perhaps a bit into Taymor.It's about Prospero drown his books--why drown,
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not burn? and the island as a rezonezing og of biobibliopolitics asarhcive management. Focusing on Prosoer's Books and Taymor's film."This bare island" life (and death). Since Robinson Crusoe has beencompared so often to Prospero, I wil lbe able to triangulate Beast andSov 2 and passages on survivance and burial very eaily. First move isto collapse descostruciotn and New Hisotricism n the book on thearchive--bruend in Archive Fever, Ataued le MOMA, Cinders, Post Card,etc. Inhumation nad cremation , but not "marination" in Beast andSov. Title of chapter "Drown Before Reading: The Tempest's Watermarks"
Tempted to call it Prospero's Unused BooksStrange that book historians never think of books damaged by water.Just pencils, cuts, scratches, tears, rips, burn marks. And of coursethey never think of readers as used, as damaged. Maybe "UsedReadings" Or "Used Readers"
Mowat also radically simplifies the Greenaway away by making Caliban the only one who destroys books (Ariel is peeing on the first book, the book of water) and why she not examine the non-binary of drown and burn--Prospero destroys his books, obviously. So he and Caliban ended wanted to do the same thing using different means. A difference with and without a difference.
This damn'd witch Sycorax,For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terribleTo enter human hearing, from Argier,Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she didThey would not take her life. Is not this true?
This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with childAnd here was left by the sailors
within which space she diedAnd left thee there; where thou didst vent thy groansAs fast as mill-wheels strike. Then was this island--Save for the son that she did litter here,A freckled whelp hag-born--not honour'd with
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A human shape.
How do you read these lines?
This damn'd witch Sycorax,For mischiefs manifold and sorceries terribleTo enter human hearing, from Argier,Thou know'st, was banish'd: for one thing she didThey would not take her life. Is not this true?
She was banished for sorceress but what is the one thing she did thatprevented them from executing her? Syntactic parallelism between "Formischiefs" and "for one thing"
Arden glosses "For" as "because in line 272 "for thou wast a spirit . . ."Arden 3 says "debate over the 'one thing' has flourished. "Flourishedstrikes me as a strange verb to use.
Dominant explanation seems to be her pregnancy.But the next line doesn't really make that work:
"The blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child, / And was left by th'sailors.
Editors who favor pregnancy claim that she could not have beenexecuted if she were pregnant. But the play conspicuously does notgloss the “one thing” she did as her being pregnant. Also pregnancy is notsomething a man does, much a less a woman. I supposed you say the onething she did was get pregnant. But that's kind of a stretch becauseshe is not the agent, the guy who other pregnant is.
I would call this passage elliptical. There's a space between onething she did and "brought with child." And should getting pregnantbe singled out as singular, as hte one thing? Pregnancy makes sense.it's just that the words don't say what editors want them to say.
It’s may be the cleanest text. It is the text editors are most willing not to emend, the contradictions of which they overlook.
GONZALOAll torment, trouble, wonder and amazementInhabits here: some heavenly power guide us
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Out of this fearful country!
ARIELYou are three men of sin, whom Destiny,That hath to instrument this lower worldAnd what is in't, the never-surfeited seaHath caused to belch up you; and on this islandWhere man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst menBeing most unfit to live. I have made you mad;And even with such-like valour men hang and drownTheir proper selves.
Hang and drown—so Gonzalo’s distinction between death by drowning and by hanging is collapsed by Ariel.
“Whilst all the other volumes have been drowned and destroyed, we still do have
these last two books safely fished from the sea.”
91.30 Here begins a montage. As Prospero’s magic is nullified—so the products of
htat magic disappear. There are inevitable comparisons and delibearate
correspondences between this breadown and the former collapse of the masque.
The wholesale disappearance and tstruciton is accompanied by ‘natural’ sound.
(2) a pile of books in he bath-colonnade topples over.
(5) Pages fall out of a book.
(10) Text ona page disappears as though attacked by acid a second before the page
itself disappears.
(13) Books in the lbrary begin to fall of the shelves.
(23) More books in the library begin to fall and topple from the shelves—but they
fade away before they reach the floor.
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9.29. The whole sequence has been accompanied by Prospero’s magic music. . .
Prospero takes his magic stick—the crozier-like wand—and snaps it in half. (162)
Book
9.2. Taking the book from the wheelbarrow . . . Ariel pases them to Prospero—who
briefly regrds them—then . . . with gestures that are almost non-chalant . . . he hurls
htem into the sea . . . . (161)
Then each book is listed on p. 161-162 with a separate number and referenced back
to the shot in which it first appeared.
That does not happen in the film. We don’t know which books are being destroyed.
Shots of Prospero’s library show that his collection far exceeds the the 25 books
mentioned in the film.
Some shots of books underwater, some shots of pages floating.
Books drowned in Taymor are still intact.
Laureniziana Library atrium, 81
The Laurentian Library (Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) is a historical
library in Florence, Italy, containing a repository of more than 11,000
manuscripts and
01.25. The book of motion )Shot 82.3)Prospero undies the straps that bind it and all
its pages immediately break free—as though never bound—they blow away.” (162)
Loop of word “aqua” appearing and disappearing on “The End.” Two lines of bleed
through text from right to left on the upper right corner appears and disappears.
9.31. Prospero—on the sea cliff—hurls the two pieces of his wand into the sea.
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91.32 On the surface of the sea—the two peces of his wand turn into green sea-
serpents and at once swim away. (163)
91.27 Prospero makes a decision and htrows htem both intot he sea.
Not edibleFull fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
But also edible: Alonso:
O thou mine heir
Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee?
Yet the verb “drown” in Prospero’s case does not imply anything like murder, nor
does it call up a final resting place for the corpus of his library, a library already
divided by Gonzalo who gave Prospero only some volumes of his library. The sea is
not a crypt.
Related problem with Mowat’s account is that her account of media is asyncrhonic—history of magic is history of manuscripts; but Prospero refers to his book, not his manuscript. According to Mowat, manuscript was not printed because dangerous.
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But it is not a grimier because to is not a manuscript. That is the basic point she misses. It can’t be, by definition.
We could ask even more questions of the usual sort. Does Caliban know how to read? Does he know letters? Can he write? Or can he just speak English? Why doesn’t Caliban tell S and T to get Prospero’s staff? For Prospero, the destruction of both appears to be required. Is Caliban wrong? Is it the staff that is really the technology of power and the book just a recipe book to be consulted, not a book about magic, not a magical book?
Ur essay, via shipwreck—Robinson Cruose in Beast and SOv 2—Crusoe and Prospero—is to reroute the Foucualt of discipline and punish to biopolitics, and biopolitics as , for Foucault, a question of the book, the archive and archive management, or Derrida, archive fever and destruction. We might end with the passage from Don Quixote. The narrator passes on censoring the censor—just doubts the total extermination approach. Fire as weapon of mass destruction.
Start with bury my staff and drown my book.
Let us return to the first crux—book and books? What is a book? Second, book as phantom propThird bury staff versus drown book.
Relation between hand and book—how does Prospero get his book from Ariel, the book of love?
Ferdinand’s corpse appears in line “muddied” and then the text—the manuscript-- gets muddied. Text gets cleaned up, then Ferdinand in close up, coming back to life, Miranda finding him. Black out during the film makes this passage from book to life possible.Book of mirrors images the lifespan of the reader. Different ages. But not necessarily linear. Taymor’s floating books are all open, intact. Recovereable. They are soaking up water, not being marked or damaged by it. Blanchot on the indestruible As if they were wetware, in a cryonic state, like a flm reel. Except not a fil real but a master. Or remastered master.
BLANCHOT'S. "THE. INDESTRUCTIBLE". Infinite Conversation
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But first, let’s situate the drowning of books in relation to the medium of books in the play. To our knowledge, no critichas ever asked why. To be sure, Caliban says “burn but his books.” And burn is the def ault for literature, deconstruction, and New Historicism and the book history of the New New historicism. Don Quixote. (Execration Upon Vulcan) Archive Fever. Martial law in the Land of Caokaigyne. We may speculate that critics have not gotten to this question because they have been hung on other questions: why are there no books for proprso Why does Prospero refer to his books and his book? These problems are not cruxes. To my book may mean “one of my books” and thus make sense, but the words do not say that. They may be reasonably interpreted that, but the words as they are printed are in need of glossing precisely because they don’t mean what an editor or critic wants them to mean. Other questions? What books are in the library? Are there magic books? Black magic or white? Or is there only one book, a magic book, a grimoire? Why does he mention his staff and his books, but not his cloak? Materialist criticism bypasses question of the referent in favor of the real. There must be a prop. It is off-stage. Halluginenic. Definitely inhaled. And held it a long time. We having nothing against hallucination. The Tempest is a water-gateway drug. The first one’s always free, so it’s not a coincidence that The Tempest comes first in the Folio. And we are flooding our chapter with questions and have yet to readch our high watermark. Book or books, no books at all, is to say that we have the book or books before the book as well as the question of their destruction. We have a pre and post book.Reroute Derrida on title and book through the parergon—Title to be specified and also Restitutions. Biblion for Derrida is only damaged by fire. Question of description, of what kind of damage. And concern with drowning. Inventory of the living and the dead on the island taken several times. Decide to decide on the fate of the missing corpus. Like critics want to decide the books. Wouldn’t that be fun to think about! Let’s just assume.
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Shot Of “Gonzalo, knowing I loved my books.” The books in the
shot? All the books in the library?
Prospero’s books inverts the order of breaking the staff and
drowning the books.
Book history is bibliomania on lithium.
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Book shutting scene happens after Prospero responds to Ariels
tender” lines that they have been writin ginthe book. Incredibly
quick sequence; a third of a second in some cases; dust comes
off them, so they have been unread when open; also some shots
show Caliban’s dirty hands holding them and other shots
Prospero’s and other shots the little Ariel. Some texts are
readable if you pause, but most of the time you cannot. Last
book has no hands holding it; dust remains in the shot until it
fades to black.
Right after corpse is shown of Ferdinand and “ooze muddied.” We
see the text written and stopped. The cut to Prospero pausing
and he says the lines. Then Ariel drops onto the book. The book
is drifted, his feathers fall on it from when he was the harpy; then
the feathers disappear, the hand prints disappear, and the pae is
clean; then shot of Ariel all clean.
Book of water has suffered damage by exposure to water.
Every day some sailor’s wife has just our theme of woe.
No books seen in “I’ll drown my books; instead, table created,
Ariel’s draw a circle on a piece of paper; cut to a stage with a
large circle, girls dancing around it; Alonso et al come in.
GONZALOAll torment, trouble, wonder and amazement
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Inhabits here: some heavenly power guide usOut of this fearful country!
ARIELYou are three men of sin, whom Destiny,That hath to instrument this lower worldAnd what is in't, the never-surfeited seaHath caused to belch up you; and on this islandWhere man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst menBeing most unfit to live. I have made you mad;And even with such-like valour men hang and drownTheir proper selves.
Hang and drown—so Gonzalo’s distinction between death by drowning and by hanging is collapsed by Ariel.
In our last chapter, we wondered what it means to live the death ofthe medium of cinema. One frequently hears the word "death" inconnection with media, epsecially the book, and the end of the book,as well as the book to come, and so on.[alternate opening--book burning in Don Quixote--not deaht of thebook, but destruction of a library)In The Tempest, we ask what it means for a book to die and wherebooks go when they die. Specicially, we want to ask why Prosperosays he will drown his books. Are Prospro's books even books? Canyou have a book without a paratext? without a support? Can you havea library without an index? These questions cannot be answered interms of book history. The questions cannot be be asked. Any attemptto determine what Prospor's books are already assume that the hasbooks. This assumption is made even though book or books are notmentioned by title or other. Even hte title of Prsopero's Books isinitally uncertain: does the title refer to all of his books in hislibrary? Or only those Gonzalo gave him? To limit the refernt ot htelatter, Greenaway adds a second prologue, a prologue showing Prosperowriting lines about the volumes he prized above his dukedom. Thisfirst book follows. It has a title but no author. Critics regularlyassume that among thse boks is a magic book. Why else would Calbiantell Stefano and Trinculo to burn his books? Mowat wonders why
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Prospero refers to his book and books nd decide tht even if there isone book, it is a magic book. SHe insists that hte book as a propr isthere off-stage. And she insists it is a kind of book, a grigmoire.That the book die nto have atitle or author does not bother her.Like the rmaterialist critics doing bok history, she offers facsimilesof pages from these books to deliver a hit of the real. The hitinvolves the hallucination , temporary, of Prospero's book. It istemporary because, by the end of the essay, Mowat takes it all back.The book is not a grimgoire. Similarly, New Hisotricist Focualdianreading skips over book and bokos and also burned versus drowned.Drown does not get a note in hte Arden. We do not have a problem withhis kind of reading. Indeed, we hope you are riding high as you readthis now. For us the reference to book and books, to library and volumewithin, register the divisibility of the book. In The Post Card,Derrida says that the letter is always divisible and hence may notalways arrive at its destination. He does not distinguish between aletter and a postcard. Is the distinction between a book and a letterany more rigorous? Here is what Derrida says about the book and thearchive:We link biopolitics to bibliopolitics. This bare island--thequestion is whether it is habitable. Did anyone ever own it? Thisbare island as a blank--as a bare stage, a kind of wooden O withoutthe wood to pulp for paper. The play does nothing.
Blank Biobioliographics tempest
Derrida on destructibility of letter as divisibility of the letter; ashes, fire, cindres his
default figures for remains. But why is Blanchot’s leter ndsructible in Demeure?
What about Blanchot on the indestructible?
DaSein-feld
Geopolitics of bare island---where is here and now of the epilogue, already
detachable (see noe in Arden 3 note).
Finitude of the support versus infinity of reading.
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Since Mannoni and thers have compared The tEmpest to Rbinson Crusoe, we can
work tempest into relation with Beast and Sovereign 2. Get to autobiothangora[hy
thoruwh the epilogue—also rough magic.
I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks hehath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion isperfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to hishanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,for our own doth little advantage. If he be notborn to be hanged, our case is miserable.
or we run ourselves aground:
Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO
Yet again!
ANTONIOHang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.
GONZALOI'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship wereno stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as anunstanched wench.
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BoatswainLay her a-hold, a-hold! set her two courses off tosea again; lay her off.
MarinersAll lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!BoatswainWhat, must our mouths be cold?
{Arden 3 annotates col as drown)
ANTONIOWe are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:This wide-chapp'd rascal--would thou mightst lie drowningThe washing of ten tides!
ANTONIOLet's all sink with the king.SEBASTIANLet's take leave of him.Exeunt ANTONIO and SEBASTIAN
GONZALONow would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for anacre of barren ground, long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done! but I would faindie a dry death.
“All perished” “I would sunk the ocean in the earth” Miranda 1.1.
Poor souls, they perish'd.Had I been any god of power, I wouldHave sunk the sea within the earth or ere
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It should the good ship so have swallow'd andThe fraughting souls within her.
Betid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink.
Me, poor man, my libraryWas dukedom large enough:
MIRANDAWherefore did they notThat hour destroy us?PROSPEROWell demanded, wench:My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,So dear the love my people bore me, nor setA mark so bloody on the business, butWith colours fairer painted their foul ends.In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,Bore us some leagues to sea; where they preparedA rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very ratsInstinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sighTo the winds whose pity, sighing back again,Did us but loving wrong.
MIRANDAHow came we ashore?PROSPEROBy Providence divine.Some food we had and some fresh water that
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A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,Out of his charity, being then appointedMaster of this design, did give us, withRich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd meFrom mine own library with volumes thatI prize above my dukedom.
My enemy inveterate
Extirpate me from the kingdom
Prepared the rotten carcass of a butt
The ship is itself decaying flesh. The very rats had quit it.
By accident most strnage, bountiful Fortune hat h brought mine enimes to this
shore.
Plummer as Propsero holdsa book when he says “I’ll to my book”
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, 3,3
In Prospero’s Books, The Folio is a blank—it contains all of the other books, but at
some time in the future; The play has been written and is yet to be written, that is
published. In what sense are the books in the film books? Page as frame versus film
frame. COnstnat dispersion of borders, or interference through superimposition.
Books are not drowned—thrown in water, but catch in fire, except for the Folio.
Bibliopolitics—survivance and state of exception—which books live and which
books die? That is the question Greenaway explores, but he does so by producing
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both creation and destruction of the book, unfolding the book into a set, turning
pages into part of a mise-en-scene. And if Prospero is a sovereign, his kingdom is a
bathtub with a toy boat. He watches the shipwreck,, in the book of mirrors, in the
form of a Rembrandt group portrait. The page is like an image in an album. Or is he
watching a film? A book projected as a film? The book of plants is actually a
collection of dried leaves. There is a book of sex and a book of love, but not a book
of death, as far as I recall. No book of graveyards.
The play is about the intersection of biopolitics and bibliopolitics. Life of books, life
of persons.
Book history is bibliomania on lithium.
← It tries to quiet the mania by linearizing it and by putting in the means of
production illustrations, like the French Book on exceptional books, Pascal
Fulacher, Livres d’exception : Six siècles d art du livre parmi les collections du
Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits CITADELLES ET MAZENOD (3
septembre 2012)
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Relation between the book and the age. See Derrida on the page. Shot of open
books with the violin. Open or closed book?
See Jean Luc-Nacy on opening a book
As a matter of principle, the book is illegible,
and it calls for or commands reading in the name of that illegibility. Illegibility is not
a question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is what
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remains closed in the opening of the book. What slips from page to page but remains
caught, glued, stitched into the binding, or else laboriously jotted as marginalia that
attempt to trip over the secret, that begin to write another book. What is illegible is
not reading at all, yet only by starting
from it does something then offer itself to reading.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Publication of the Unpublished," in On the Commerce of
Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores, 27.
There is always a closed and inviolable book in the middle of every book that is
opened, held apart between the hands that turn its pages, and whose every
revolution, each turn from recto to verso begins to fail to achieve its deciphering, to
shed light on its sense. For that reason every book, inasmuch as it is a book, is
unpublished, even though it repeats and relays individually, as each one does, the
thousands of other books that are reflected in it like worlds in a monad. The book is
unpublished [inedit], and it is that that the publisher [editeur] publishes. The editor
(Latin) is the one who brings to the light of day, exposes to the outside offers (edo)
to view and to knowledge. That doesn't, however, mean that once it is published the
book is no longer unpublished; on the contrary, it remains that, and even becomes it
more and more. It offers in full light of day, in full legibility, the insistent tracing of
its illegibility.
—Jean-Luc Nancy, On the Commerce of Thinking (2008), 28.
"Here There
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Open Book, Closed Book
Protestations
Here and there, we find the body and we find
the book, the open and the closed book"
—Jacques Derrida, " . . . , " in The Work of Mourning, 159.
oN board “let’s leave the kind” It is an abandon ship narrative. Also, it’s about being
born to die a certain way, by hanging in the case of the boastswain, according to
Gonzalo.
Undrowning the Book
We discussed what it means to live the death of the medium of cinema in our last
chapter. That question became a question of the burial crypt in the play, a question
of amends promised by the prologue and the future anterior of Juliet’s anxiety of
dying or waking up too early. We not are asking what it means for a book to die, but
more specifically, how drowning is related to burial. Drowning has a singularity.
The books are invisible in two ways—there is material prop—and without
paratexts, no titles, no authors. So if the book is a grimgoire, it is not a particular
grimgoire. It is not a source, uch less a prop; Mowat conflates a source (perhas
derived from AMND rather than a source for it) and a prop. This list of titles is what
Greenaway tries to provide. The only named author is Shakespeare.
The Destruction of Prospero’s Books. Greenaway’s shows Prospero’s library being
reading, books torn, burned, people killed; the book of water (first book) and the
book of mirrors (second mirror show a book being rained on and pages being
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destroyed and also being peed on by Ariel. We see Miranda reading a book of
plants. Miranda is sleeping the time in the opening sequence. She is having a
nightmare. Prospero seen writing “I would fain die a dry DEATH.” Greenaway's film
and had forgotten how many times books come up in the "adaptation" part--the
library is destroyed--we see the books Gonzalo gave Prospero; Miranda reads one of
the books. And the first book, the Book of Water, gets rained and the pages we see
appear to be being destroyed by the water; it is also being peed on by Ariel. So there
is a variety of ways in which books are being shown being destroyed before we see
Prospero burn his books by drowning them.
Wake Up Call in The Tempest . Two scenes of books seemingly being destroyed
(library) and also scene of books that Gonzalo gives Prospero. Plus Prospero’s
library plus hot of violin and pages of music and other writing lying off a table and
books opened be low. Book one is written as it is also being destroyed. Water ink
used by Gielgud.
Bring together the passage on the phantasm and sleep as more vigilant than
wakefulness together with the passage on survivance and the corpse, both from
Beast and the Sovereign 2.
The logic of the phantasm, as we are concerned with it here (be it about living death, the
ghost or the revenant, about cremation or the posthumous), [this logic of the phantasm] is
not strictly speaking a logic, it resists the logos, the legein of the logos, somewhat in the
same way as the eschato-logical is both the thing of the logos and which exceeds and
comes after the logos, the logic of the logos, the extremity of the last, of the last word of
the last man, the extremity of the last extremity situated both in speech, in logos as the
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last word, still and already out of speech, falling out of it into the posthumous that is
already breathing, precisely, the logic of the phantasm resists, defies and dislocates logos
and logic in all its figures, be it a question of logos as reason and as the logic of non-
contradiction and the excluded middle. Of yes or no, of the yes and the no, of the
undecidable either/or, be it a question of logos as speech or be it a question of logos as
gathering and the power of putting together. There is therefore no logic of the phantasm,
strictly speaking, since as Freud reminds us, the phantasm, just as much as the drive, is to
be found on both sides of the limit between two opposing concepts, like what Blanchot
nicknames, especially in The Step Not Beyond (we shall come to this in a moment), the
neuter. There is therefore no logic or logos of the phantasm of the ghost or the spectral.
Unless the logos itself be precisely the phantasm, the very element, the origin and the
resource of the phantasm itself, the form and the formation of the phantasm, or even of
the revenant.
This is why all the things we’re dealing with here, sovereignty the animal, the living
dead, the buried alive, etc., the spectral and the posthumous—well, the dream, the
oneiric, fiction, so-called literary fiction, so-called fantastic literature will always be less
inappropriate, more relevant, if you prefer, than the authority of wakefulness, and the
vigilance of the ego, and the consciousness of so-called philosophical discourse.
Amor (love) tization
Borders of Enlightenment opened up, with tour guide to mark them. Prospero as
guide. But for the Enlightenment to happen the alarm has to be sounded—wake up-
and for the alarm to sound it has to set, and it can be forgotten. The alarm setter
can forget to set his alarm. Prospero is a guide, but he is on a detour, going n a
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circle, going back, remember and retrieval. The camera is a kind of tour guide in
Taymor—the split between shots of realism and shots with special effects.
Obvious narrative repetitions are other kinds of repetitions.
Cluster of words book, books,
Corpse is buried at sea. Sleep like death.
Book drowned—people are to drown; question of burial at sea. No one buried on
the island. Al lost at sea; or in ship.
Daniel Heller-Roazen The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (MIT Pres,
2009)
There is no state of emergency or martial law in The Tempest. There is no law.
There’s no even piracy. There is a state of exception to the state of exception partly
because the sovereign is not the sovereign, not the decider.
Meting out of punishments in Much Ado (we’ll devise brave punishments for him)
and Measure for Measure (Bernadine and beheading). Measure—coins, stamped,
circulation—numismatic writing. All are punished” Duke in Romeo and Juliet.
Media in Much Ado About Nothing—noting and marking—and in Measure for
Measure (Greenblatt treats and The Tempest as if they were identical cases of
salutary anxiety) but lack of medium—the books as disappeared, out-of-circulation
in The Tempest. Prospero as a book cover. He seems invisible, but he is hiding
something that is neither hidden nor revealed.
Daniel Heller-Roazen The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
There’s no shoreline, no border in The Tempest.
23
Survivance –opens up living death but is itself neither life nor death-the near
destruction followed by restoration and reassurance is a structure between two
drownings. Friend and enemy.
Relation between the two undronwings o fhte obok and the undrownings f the
people on board—book does not die, but noether do people. But sharper difference
still—imgained corpses are buried; imgianed destruction of staff is bried. But the
not the book; the book alone is related to drowning, no crypt.
Taymor’s film organized by set pieces, like her other films (Frieda; Titus) and music
videos in Around the Universe. In case of the Tempest, these were designed by Kyle
Cooper, who also did the end title sequence. There is the shipwreck; the harpy
banquet; also added a music video. O Mistress Mine. The rest of the film alternates
between special effects and no special effects. Mostly for Ariel. The shipwreck is
real, then replayed as a special effects set piece. Miranda-centric reading. Miranda
already wide awake—the castle melting in the storm. Taymor’s film is about
getting there in time to stop destruction that has already occurred. Attention
followed by reassurance followed by distraction. Here. Take a xanex now and go to
sleep.
Economy of drowned book an economy of invisibility. You don’t notice the cruxes.
They don’t need to be commented on. Fire and drown is not a crux traditionally
speaking. It is a microform version of the structure of the play. Directors do notice
the missing books and sometimes put them in and other times leave them out.
24
The play imagines a world in which there is only speech. The scene is entirely
speech, But that world becomes all the less determinate as a consequence—you
don’t know what is real and what is hallucinated. The suspension of the book as
referent generates a kind of generalized psychosis, a missing blank, a recursive
structure of temporality, a question of living and dead, human and animal. Despite
the references to art, rough magic, and theater in the theater, this is a theater
without media. It’s a question of attending, of paying attention but also waiting on,
an attentive attendant. Sort out archival recall and telling, the capacity to tell, and
sleep and death states of consciousness, states of attention, or inattention, or states
of distraction. Like boatswain telling upon waking, also Prospero putting Miranda
to sleep. Sort of collapses the opposition between discipline of attention and the
vacation distraction. “Lie there my art” conflates both Miranda and his art, but art
does not include his books, just his staff and cloak. There is a rift between books.
What do books have to do with the shipwreck. Is Miranda already on stage? She is
a witness in Taymor film, not in Prospero’s Books.
4. Drown before Reading: Vacancy in The Tempest
What does it mean that Prospero says he will drown his books? Why drown rather than burn them? This question arises not only because “drown” is unusual and even enigmatic but because Caliban has told Stefano and Trinculo “burn but his books” and, along with driving a nail through Prospero’s head, they become the sovereign rulers of the island and take Miranda as their prize.2 The question concerning drowning books is our point of departure in this chapter for reading the Juliet Taymor’s Tempest and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. We first engage the Arden’s notes on Prospero’s books and then examine both the sequence showing Prospero drowning his books in Prospero’s Books and to books “drowning” in the end title sequence Taymor’s film. Rather that compare these films to the “original” text, we regard both the Arden and the films as editions of the play, editors and directors being roughly comparable in rendering the play’s cruxes books
25
readable.3 These cruxes include the contradictory references to Prospero’s “book” in the singular and his “books” in the plural and the a between references to Prospero’s cloak and staff as props but not to his book or books. For us, the interest of both films lies in their response to a less familiar crux regarding the preservation contradictory modes of the destruction of Prospero’s library. Despite Caliban’s instruction to “burn” Prospero’s books, Prospero says he will “drown” them. The play includes references both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”; “I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”; “burn but his books”). Moreover, there are stage directions for Prospero’s cloak and staff, but none for his book or library. “I’ll
to my book, / For yet ere suppertime must I perform / Much business” (3.1.113–15),
Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am; nor hath not
One spirit to command: they all do hate him
As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
(3.2.91–95)
Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
(1.2.165–68)
The endings of both films indirectly return us to a question about media raised in
“original and true copie,” or first edition of The Tempest, a question about what
Derrida calls the end of the book (Grammatology) and the survivance of the book:
how does a book to die? how does its biographical destruction differ from the
destruction of bios, of a human corpse? What does it mean to drown books that are
divisible, singular plural, and have no referents on stage? What happens when
26
books are no material, not props? What kind of library contains books that have no
paratexts, no titles and authors? What does it mean that Prospero effectively
promises to drown his books at some indefinite time in the future, to promise
destruction without delivering it? And what does it mean that The Tempest, a play
in which the main character says he prizes his books above his dukedom, does not
include a scene of reading or of writing, as does a play to which it is often compared,
namely, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?4 Why do books and libraries go
missing in The Tempest, and what is the relation between their drowning, or to be
drowned, to be destroyed by burning, and the biopower is exercised solely through
speech?
New Historicist and New New Historicist criticism of the play miss these
questions and alternately tries Prospero has a book, not books, even though the
book is a composite of pages taken from multiple grimgroires, or it tries to imagine
the destruction of the books exclusively in Caliban’s terms, as burning, skipping over
the oddity of Prospero’s destruction by drowning and displaced by a more general,
characterological question about Prospero: why does he abjure his rough magic?5
Yet
Greenaway—focus on five sequences about there being no metabook, the same way
there is no metaarchive. (metalanguage, for Lacan)
Burial and the book
1. Corpse of Ferdinand and dirty Ariel, dirty book, clean book, clean Ariel.
27
2. The closed book sequence after three different actors playing Ariel write “mine
would, sir, were I human” versus the descriptions / voice overs about opened pages.
Closing the books doesn’t stop more of them from being opened. Closing the book is
not ending the book. Shots of the hand, of dust.
3. The island as a grave destruction of the book and murder of Ariel and rape of
Miranda; yet no burial
Which Followed by fade to black?
4. The drowning of the book at the end and the not drowning of it at the start-
{rosperondd Miranda both reading.
5. The Folio and tempest
6. The End and title sequence—which are Prospero’s books?
Virginia Mason-Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan. Arden. 2011
ACT II SCENE II
Section 76
THE ‘ANTIQUARIAN’ BEACH
76.1 As the camera tracks at a steady pace—there are objects on the beach-- . . the
evidence of a buried kingdom, a vast cemetery, a huge columbarium, an
antiquarian’s paradise.” 125
Prospero as antiquarian, 124
“AS well as having his books scattered around him, their lose pages flapping in a
daught, he is surrounded by his antique collection—small marble obelisks,
28
fragments of antique sculpture, stone heads, small tablet inscriptions . . . the
collection of a diletatante antiquarianof 1611.” 124
(2) . . . we see the oppled Prospero of Calibans thinking—seen from different angles
—
(3) . . . Bloodied in his studio . . an image of his brain smashed in, his naked stomach
pierced by a large stake, his throat horribly cut. (126)
PROSPERO (playing Caliban):
Burn but his books.
In the faun-held mirrors, a brand is put to Prospero’s books, which immediately
burst into flame—the whirling, twisting, burnt paper fragments blacken the
mirrors . . . and contrast with the unburnt, whirling white pages that swirl about on
the ‘antqiuarian’ beach. 126
(Caliban catches up and leads the trio again—this time faster still—now among a
veritable jungle of statues of tombs, cenotaphs and stone bric-a-brac from the
classical world . . . that begins to dwarf them.) 126
PROSPERO (playing Caliban):
When Prospero is destroyed! (127)
Is the Island a Grave?
1. The Book of Water. This is a waterproof-covered book which has lots its
colour by much contact with water. It is full of nvestigative drawings and
exploratory texts many different thicknesses of paper. P. 17
2. 2. Book of Mirrors. Bound ina oldd cloth and very heavy, this book has some
eighty shining mirrored pages; some opaque , some translucent, some
29
manufactured with silvered paper,s some coated in paint, some covered in a
film of mercury that will orll of the page unless treated cautiously. Some
mirrors simply reflect the reader, some reflect the reader as he ws three
minutes previously, some reflect the reader as he will e in a year’s time, as he
would be if her were a child, a woman, a monster, an idea, a text or an agnel.
One mirror contantly lies, one mirror sees the world backwards, another
upside down. One mirror holds on to its reflections as frozen moments
infinitely recalled. One mirror simply reflects another mirror acorss a page.
There are ten mirrors whose piurpose Prospero has yet to define. 17
3. 21 he Auobiographies of {asiphae and Semiramis is a pronogrpahy. It is a
blackned and thumbed volume whose illustrations leave small ambiguity as
to the book’s content. The book is bound in black calfskin with damaged
lead covers. The pages are grey-green and scattered with a sludge-green
poweder, crled black hairs and stains of blood and other substnaces. The
slightest taint of steam or smoke rises from the pages when the book I
opened, and it always seems warm—like the little the apparent in drying
plaster or in flat stones after the sun has set. The pages leave acidic stains on
the fingers and it is advisable to wear gloves when reading the volume.
4. 24. Thirty-Six Plays. This is a thick, printed volume of plays dated 1623. All
thrty-six plays are there save one—the first. Nineteen pages are left blank for
its inclusion, It is called The Tempest. The folio collection is modestly bound
in dull green linenen with cardboard covers and the author’s initials are
embossed in gold on the cover—W.S. (25)
30
5. An Atlas Belonging to Orpheus. Bound ina battered and burnt, enamlled
green cover, this Atlas is divided into twosections. . . When the atlas is
opened, the maps bubble with pitch. Avalanches of hot, loose gravel and
molten and sand fall out of the book to scorch the library floor.
7. The Book of Colours. “when the pages are opened . . .
16. A Book of Love. This is a small, slim, scented volume bound in red and
gold, with knotted crimson ribbons for page-markers.
Book of Utopias is an interactive book “In the remaining pages of the page, every
known and every imagined social community is described and evaluated, and
twenty-five pages are devoted to tables where the characteristics can be isolated,
permitting the reader to sort and match his own utopian ideal” 24
Interaction depends on a table of contents.
10. A Book of Travellers’ Tales. This is a book tat is much damaged, as though used a
great deal by children who treasured it. The scratched and rubbed crimson leather
covers, once inlaid with a figurative gold design, are no so worn that the pattern is
ambiguous and a fit subject for much speculation.” 20
12. A Book of Architecture and Other Music. When the pages are opened in this
book, plans and diagrams spring up fully-formed. . . With this book, Prospero rebuilt
the island into a a palace of libraries that recapitulate all the architectural ideas of
the Renaissance.” 21
4. A Primer of the Small Stars. . . When opened, the primer’s pages twinkle with
travelling planets, flashing meteors and spinning comets. 17; 20
31
6. A Harsh Book of Geometry. . . . Wen opened, complex three-dimensional
geometrical diagrams rise up out of the pages like models in a pop-up book. 20
13. The Ninety-Two Conceits of the Minotaur. “When opened, the book exudes
yellow steam am dot coats the fingers with a black soil.” 21
Prospero’s Used Books
Watermarking Readers
None of Prospero’s book is a magic book.
”Prospero is also . . . a magician. He wears magic robes, uses a magic staff and refers
to his books on magic. Magic is his technology, a means of getting what he wants.
(Arden 3, 25)
One’s reaction to Prospero almost inevitably determines one’s response to the
entire play. (Arden 3, 24)
In Prospero’s library—the books seem unable to contain their arcane knowledge,
and at each book section there is an overspill of objects and people and events. (82)
When Prospero levaes the library—the camera swings ninety degrees as the the
leemnts of his library grow comatose . . . and return to their rightful place inside the
books . . . after ten seconds the library s neat and organized. . . the various figures
and objects and animals gone . . . the library tidy and well disciplined. . . . (83)
Book 9
An Alphabetical Inventory of the Dead. This is a funeral volume, long and slim and
bound in silver bark. It contains all the names of the dead who have lived on earth.
The first name is Adam and the last is Susannah, Prospero’s wife. . . The pages of the
book are very old and are watermarked with a collection of designs for tombs and
32
columbariums, elaborate headstones, graves, sarcophagi, and other architectural
follies for the dead, suggesting the book had other purposes, even before the death
of Adam. (20)
My Blank Pages
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote includes a notable scene of book destruction.
In order to prevent him from going on another request after he has been catured
and returned home, his entire library is burned: “That very night, the housekeeper
set fire to, and consumed, not only all the books that were in the yard, but also every
one she could find in the house; and no doubt many were burned, which deserved to
have been kept as perpetual archives.”6 This scorched book policy takes no
prisoners. With book goes the archive. We cite this example of book burning as one
of many in literature and drama: letters, manuscripts, and printed books are
destroyed by being torn up and burned.7 To our knowledge, The Tempest is unique
in the history of literature in imagining the destruction of books by drowning them.
Prospero’s promise that he will drone his books is singular within the play as well.
Prospero’s intention to burn all the more remarkable in that their destruction is
different from Prospero’s plan to inhume his staff: “I’ll break my staff, /Bury it
certain fathoms in the earth.” Why break bury his staff but not tear and drown his
books? In a play concerned with death by drowning, books are the only items
without a final resting place.
But the singularity of drowning is part of books is not merely a bizarre moment but
the most intense site of pressure in a structure related to burial of corpses as well as
Prospero’s props with differences that rest on a coninuum with microdifferences
33
between book and books.
Why does drowning turn out to be inhumation for Alonso but not for Prospero?
Something going on the directors and editors want to fill in or to pass over in
silence.
The epilogue implies that Prospero has destroyed his staff—power’s but his
own—or does it? Has he actually destroyed them after he says he will? Why
assume he has, but that scene is elided, not represented. Like Branagh’s inset
flashbacks, the Ariel set piece is illustrative. But Taymor also sorts out the issue by
showing the stff drown—above and below—but the n we only see the boks
underwater. No cross cutting to Prospero throwing them in. And when they show
up, they show up without paratexts. They are like the books in Arcimboldo’s
Librarian. Taymor has Prospera throw her staff unbroken into the ocean. The
books follow. She scorches the earth before removing the spell from her victims.
Prospero’s burial of his staff takes one of the most common form of the preservation
and destruction of human corpses: inhumation and cremation.
What’s constitutes a crux? Ordinarily, a semantic unit, a single word choice.
In this case contradictory variables become a symptom. Plural and singular We
wish turn now to the Arden Three Tempest as one edition among others that
concern Prospero’s books. From this analysis we will read the edited text of the
play in order to make clearer its economy of unreadability as unarchivability.
To focus on the drowning of the book is to reorient what it means for the
book to be singular and plural, for the books not to be a prop, as a question not only
of the referent, of the materiality of the referent, but of its burial, its relation to other
34
kinds of burial in the play and hence to mourning but also to sleep and death. What
happens if drowning does not mean burial?
[text of play in this note] 8
She ends up rerouting the magic bookissue back to Greenblatt, and she aligns his reading of the play withGreenaway's film. It's totally structuralist--Prospero preservesbooks--good--and Caliban bad; or the opposite. Those are our choices. In her eagerness to get to the magic book she assumes Prospero haswith him, she skips over drown versus bury, of course, but also overthe contradiction between book and books. Ditto for the missing prop. SHe verges so closely on going in the right direction--she sees allthe things getting in her way--but then she veers off into herhallucinogenic comfort zone. I was also struck--so belatedly--by theway New Historicism rebrands the ideal reader of reader responsecriticism--so the reader or the viewer of the past is always in effecta cognitive machine that never breaks down and for whom reading,seeing, and listening are error free and media totally transparent.The tense is the give away "would have." No doubt about it! Notsome,or perhaps, or any similar qualifier necessary. And Mowat canthen relay that reader to the future researcher who will one day beall to conclude something. Totally clerical--onward Shakespearesoldiers.
Anyway, it's a perfect way into the issue of the book as a crux forus--as a cluster-fuck of cruxes that open onto corpses, life anddeath, burial, destruction, divisibility, etc. that challenges bothNew Historicism and deconstruction (Derrida defaults to burning justthe way Greenblatt does, both in the anecdote he tells about burnedbooks in Learning to Curse and in the one he tells in ShakespeareanNegotiations.
The magic book , for Mowat, is just one one many “silences” Arden 3 notes (and quotes others as having noticed)—like Antonio’s silence. We are onto a structure of ellipse in the text, not just a text with a few elipses—what happened to CLaribel?
I am afraid the essay may take a some Mowat form, as in Greenaway goodbecause he multiplies cruxes and contradictions already present in thetext rather than resolves them while Taymor is bad because she draw
35
cinematic borders around unzoned areas of the text. She wants topreserve the book by putting it outside the film, in the end titlesequence.
Need to think more about the way Greenaway makes Prospero into apuppet master, turns the ships into toy boats, fold out book into abuilding and the reverse.
Ariel's full fathom five in relation to survivance, use The Beast and the
Sovereign, 2, to talk about "sea change" and drowning books. The dead yet not yet
dead fantasy seems to depend very specifically on water--on a shipwreck that isn't,
on a father drowning who didn't. Are all of these nearly immediate recuperations
necessary for the book to be absent as a prop, to be drowned off stage, to be
diverted by a bottle from Caliban's desire to burn but his books? Strange economy
of survival, the corpse, and the book without embalmment, the book as balm, not
blame, here.9 It is an economy of “undrowning,” to adopt the idiom of the play. But
burial in Prospero’s phrasing also anticipates drowning in that “fathoms” measure
depth of water (as in in “full fathom five”), not earth.
Prospero consoles Miranda. But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly
assuring answers. He need for reassurance is repated. Whether or not yo see it,
wtness it doesn’t matter. Both Miranda and Prospero saw it.
Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather
from the boatswain scene in 1.1. and a fuller account of its repair. The same
potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never
happened. Ariel closes a gap in Prospero’s narrative. Ariel as panoptic narrator.
36
Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice.
Dialogue about Caliban and Tricunclo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern,
in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban under a
cloth).
Ferdinand hears that his father lies full fathom five below—sea change and
all—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:
Although this lord of wake remembrance – this
Who shall be of little memory
When it is earthed 2.1. 232-34
The King’s son’s alive,
“’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned
As he that sleeps swims. 236-38
Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned?
Sebastian: He’s gone. 233-34
The Tempest is an abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck narrative like Robinson
Crusoe. In the first scene, the characters on board take their chances with drowning.
They’ve decided to risk drowning. Prosper later decides to drown his books. What
does it mean to drown a person as opposed to drown a person? Let us proceed to
address this question by returning to crux regarding the referent of “book” and
“books” as an exception with regard to their destruction. The irreconcilably
singular and plural references to a book and to books in The Tempest marks a
certain exception with regard to the book that bears on its survival: it is both
singular and divisible. And this exception is sustained by a larger suspension
37
between two moments in the play, one near the beginning Prospero’s tells Miranda
they cast adrift in a boat along with some of his books and the other when Prospero
promises to drown his book. That promise is never fulfilled in the play (something
on which Mowat does not comment). The book would have drowned to begin with
if they had met their intended fate. In short the book / books are never destroyed in
the play; they appear to be as indestructible as they are non-existent.10
The “book” / “books” crux is exceptional in respect to the survival of characters
and their construction as corpses. Scenes of destruction by shipwreck are resolved
into scenes of reported recovery occur in multiple ways and multiple times. But
even the norm established by the shipwreck, about which he have more to say, is
exceptional. For the ship is not actually not wrecked. And no one dies in. Indeed,
no one dies in the play. (Not even the witch Sycorax is killed; she is exiled.)
Prospero is potentially vulnerable (“destroy him”; “drive a nail into his head”), as
are Alonso and Gonzalo during a brief sleep from which Ariel awakens Gonzalo who
in turn awakens Alonso. But the play’s shipwreck differs from the book undrowning
in that the promise to drown my books implies their destruction but muddies its
exact nature.
Why is the book the vessel that cannot be presented—why is the library the space
that enables?
In shipwreck scenes, characters are let to imagine the fate of corpses, which may or
may not be destroyed. Ferdinand imagines his father’s dead body—turned to coral.
Something artificial and unburied. Other corpses suffer other kinds of changes, one
of which bleeds into Prospero’s promise to drown his book Other burial in the earth.
38
Prospero calls up the undead that have been buried. The play floats, as it were
various ways of sinking corpses into oblivion while assuring its characters and us
that all of the characters have survived. The spacing of book into book and books
does not allow us to imagine the end or the beginning of the book. The real issue is
not what the book or books are (their referents) or how many there are but the
manner of their destruction and whether they can be destroyed. We don’t know if
they will fall to the bottom in the mud or be scattered, decheminated, as Derrida
puts onto distinerrant paths. Nor are the book ever threatened with destruction in a
scene like the shipwreck. The survivability of the book’s bios differs from the
survival of biological, then, in that the book is divisible and indivisible, both a “book”
and “books.” The problem of the referent raised by the missing prop is more radical
than it may seem at first sight. The issue of referent is not reducible to fauxrensics
—to a genre, much less a single book. “The book” does not have an empirical
material referent, nor is it just a metaphor (as when Stephano tells Caliban twice to
“kiss the book,” the bottle of liquors from which he drinks).
Mourning is given time yet being skipped over—drowning means there’s no
corpse. Lost at sea. No burial. Just storage. Even Alonso’s body is not really a
corpse, just rich and strange. It’s already been turned into a sort of monument,
turned into the subject of a song which is and is not a requiem.
(For Ferdinand, it seems to be requiem.)
Assumed I am the king Ferdinand and Alonso mourning, the mistakenly assumed
deaths. Every third thought will be grave.11
39
But burial in Prospero’s phrasing also anticipates drowning in that
“fathoms” measure depth of water (as in in “full fathom five”), not earth.
Prospero consoles Miranda
But oddly, Prospero asks Ariel for similarly assuring answers.
Ariel gives both a fuller account of the shipwreck than what we have gather
from the boatswain scene in 1.1. and a fuller account of its repair. The same
potentially traumatic vision is repeated, as it were traumatic even though it never
happened.
Dialogue about Ferdinand being drowned or undrowned occurs twice.
Dialogue about Caliban and Trinculo being “dead or alive?” varies the same pattern,
in this case based on a mistakenly supposed monster (Trinculo and Caliban under a
cloth).
Ferdinand hears that his father lies full fathom five below—sea change and
all—but Antonio imagines Ferdinand buried:
Although this lord of wake remembrance – this
Who shall be of little memory
When it is earthed 2.1. 232-34
The King’s son’s alive,
“’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned
As he that sleeps swims. 236-38
Antonio: Will you grant me that Ferdinand is drowned?
Sebastian: He’s gone. 233-34
Alonso:
40
O thou mine heir
Of Naples and Milan, what strange fish
Hath made his meal on thee?
Francisco: Sir, he may live.
I saw him beat the surges under him
And rid upon their backs. He trod the water . . .
The surge most swoll’n . ..
I doubt not
He came alive to land.
Sebastian:
We have lost your son,
I fear, for ever. Alonso: No, no, he’s gone. 2.1. 112-34
Stephano: I took him to be killed with a thunder stroke.
But art thou not drowned? 2.2.107
Stephano: Here, kiss the book.” [Trinculo drinks] . . .
Come swear to that. Kiss the book. I will furnish it anon with new contents. Swear!
2.2. 127; 139
Wilt thou detroy them then? 3.2. 113
Caliban’s sleep and sleep again “isle is full of noises’ picked up Prospero’s dreams
made on rounded with a little sleep after he recalls the plot and breaks off the
masque 3.2.140; 4.2. 155-57
cloudy, 2.1. 143
41
Dead or alive? 2.2. 25—another scene of “traumatic misrecognition—Trinculo of
Caliban.
I have not ‘scaped drowning to be afeared now of your four legs, 58-59
Not is it real or not, but what kind of real? Should I be mourning? How should I
take up my relation to this thing I am now archiving? That we are talking through
and should I keep this? Or is it just a dream—Prospero. a retrieval the island
becomes an archival space. In 1.2. Prospero brings back stories, he is the database
and that search engine. He’s the software designer, not the hard drive. The play is a
revenge tragedy. The book –I’ll drown my book—how is the story of P’s being set
adrift in his books and for him to drown his books thereafter? How is that story told
in Milan?
Hear spirits in two ways—magical utopian space and as a grave, as archive, because
it is coded by P’s books, then what is the relation between being setting adrift and
generic crossing and conversion from revenge tragedy to romance? How does that
play with the shipwreck with a romance motif that is coded as tragic, as total loss?
Alonso forced to live as if his son is dead, then have him returned to him by
Prospero—letting live or letting die—sovereignty becomes the management of life.
Foucauldian biopolitical moment at the end. But the book will be drowned? To do
what to separate from the ship? From the ship Prospero is going to get back on?
Abandon ship narrative, not a shipwreck.
They take their chances with drowning. They’ve decided to risk drowning. He
decides to drown his books. What does it mean to drown a person as opposed to
drown a person? A figure of an archival oblivion: forgive and forget. Forget about it.
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Crimes to be pardoned. Pardon and perjury. Forgiveness. Hostipitality. Friend
and enemy. Witness, testimony, and archive.
Engage the Foucauldian moment at the end of The Tempest with the end of Beast
and Sovereign Vol. 2
Also a species difference because Caliban is left on the island with a story that the
play is not even interested in writing because it is not interested in telling, just a sort
of
Marination
Ahead of its time. Still of the obsolete past in the future from Bernard Tavernier’s
science-fiction thriller, Death Watch.
http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film4/blu-ray_reviews57/death_watch_blu-ray.htm
The idea of a burial at sea strikes me as being so odd. Shouldn't
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there be a word for it? Cremation, inhumation (buried in the earth),
and "marination?" When Derrida discusses cremation and inhumation in The Beast
and the
Sovereign, 2, he doesn't mention burial at sea. Derrida’s notion of a text’s “sur-
vivance” on what Derrida calls “unreadability”: sur-vivance involves various media
transfers, various material supports, or subjectiles, as well as various tropes for
not/non/un/reading.
Derrida does not consider animots in relation to corpse disposal in The Animal That
Therefore I am. Says that there is only burial or cremation in Beast and SOv 2, yet
does not talk about burial at sea. These are the only two forms of the and
destruction of corpses, according to Derrida in Beast and the Sovereign vol. 2. Misses
cannibals being both cremated and buried. Synthesize the two works. Animals
disposing of corpses? Only humans? But how do humans do it? Is there a human
way to waste, or what Alonso calls “infinite loss?” Is mourning about the tropics of
formerly human waste disposal? some one who has just be.12
There is no media ecology in the play whereby either corpses or books get recycled.
No food chain. There is predation (fishes eating Ferdinand) and there is not, just
veganism (Caliban seems to be a vegan—shows plants of the island). And then
there is the banquet from which no one eats. The banquet itself is not produced as a
special effect. Ariel’s appearance is.
XXXXXX
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A kind of enlightenment at work, but perhaps closer to what Derrida says about
phantasm and sleep being more vigilant than waking.
State of sleeping and state of death are not radically opposed but rendered as
equivalent, as if waking up were being resurrected.
Boatswain’s return
“rigged as wen / We first put out to sea. 5.1. 223-24
The “strange noises” of the isle awaken the sailors:
I were well awake, / I’d strive to tell you. [sleep compromises capacity to retrieve
form the archive, to tell—] We were dead of sleep . . 229-230
We were awaked 235
Even in a dream, were we divided from them / And brought moping hither. 238-89
boatswain goes back to the beginning—we first set out to sea—and skips to the end
—when they were awakened—so they have no story to tell]
And more diversity of sounds, all horrible, 234 (Horrible, horrible, most horrible?)
Ariel leaves the crew of the ship asleep, as if in a cryonic state. Echoes the way
Prospero has put Miranda asleep. “Lie there, my art”—ambiguous referent (another
crux) of “art” as either Miranda or his cloak and staff, his daughter or his props.
Ferdinand asking Miranda if she is a spirit or a human; Miranda asking if Ferdinand
is a sprit (Geist in German translation).
Miranda: What is’t, a spirit? . . .
It carries a brave form. But ‘tis a spirit.” 1.2.410; 412
Prospero: No, wench, it [“it,” not “he”] eats and sleeps and hath such senses
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As we have—such [anticipates Prospero’s “Dost thou think so spirit? And Ariel’s
response “Mine would, sir, were I human.” Prospero: “And mine shall. / Hast thou,
which art but air, a touch, a feeing . . .” 5.1.19-23]
This gallant which thou see’st
Was in the wreck, and he’s something stained
With grief. . .413- 416
Prospero addresses Ariel as spirit a few lines later Spirit, fine spirit, / I’ll free thee
1.2. 421.
Ferdinand: My prime request / Which I do last pronounce, is (O, you wonder!) / If
you be maid or no?
Miranda: No wonder, sir. But certainly a maid 426-28
Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being both
singular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for the
disappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt
(there, but invisible, off-stage).
SO The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?
I have not ‘scaped drowning in order
You did not drown? Stephano and Trinculo when “swum ashore like a duck”
Swear to that. Kiss the book. Swear [the book here is the bottle Caliban drinks that
Stephano offers him]
Stephano “Rest drowned, we shall inherit here.”
Prospero on inherit in “These are the stuffs that dreams are made on”
My mother is hard at study.
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Kiss means drink (kiss by the book in Romeo and Juliet)
The question devolves into a question of whether Miranda is a virgin or not.
The German is Jungfrau.
Ferdinand “Weeping again the King my father’s wreck” 1.2. 391
Ferdinand wonders if he is dreaming
When Alonso and Gonzalo are put to sleep, so to speak, they survive a near death
experience after Gonzalo is awakened by Ariel.
Remember me—remember—Prospero as Hamlet.
—there’s an expiration on his power. Extradition.
Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s
Books.
Prospero's Book as a life preserver
book as boat.
Book / boat / bark / bottle?
Prospera’s Books
The film does not show the beginning of the book or the end of the book.
No paratexts at any point, so there’s a precursive and recusrsive elippsis of the book
that keeps it by drowning it. Taymor makes explicit a pre-cursive economy of the
book that differs from other economies of drowning in the play; drowning by the
numbers—characters seem to drown but do not. This is a cycle of reassurance; lots
of scenes of reassurance that more or less repeat each other. Prospero even lies
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about the drowning of his daughter to Alonso to manufacture a symmetry between
Prospero’s loss and Alonso’s, as if Alonso’s repeated Prospero’s.
Melting sand castle between the opening title for The Tempest, rain begins, camera
dollies back and pans right as we se it begin to melt in a hand that belongs to
Miranda. (use of the words “melt,” “dissolve pace,” and so on in the play) There’s a
storm before the storm. Even before the shipwreck she sees, there is a sandcastle
wreck. Miranda first when she enters the play after the boatswain scene. 1.1.
Melting sand, dissolving sand anticipates Prospero’s
The seven minute long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by
Kyle Cooper, transposes the moment when Prospero “drowns” his books: as the
credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch Prospero’s
books fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the bottom. Taymor
originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film script but ended up restoring it. In
her book The Tempest, Taymor writes: “The film’s last image of Prospera on the
ocean cliff, her back to the camera, tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks
below, and the staff’s subsequent shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut
and timed and scored and mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated,
incomplete. I asked Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the
epilogue] and set them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence.
And to that haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and
we drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea” (21).13 Taymor enlarges
authorial agency in the preface to her book, entitled “Rough Magic,” writing that “we
drowned the books of Prospera.” Yet this enlargement of cinematic authorship
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depends on the expansive, leisurely condensation of Prospera’s transposed and
visualized declaration to “drown” her “books” and Prospera’s ventriloquized
epilogue. I read Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a
residual paratexual storage space, sending off her film and accommodating
areaderly and spectatorial desire for an authorial force by encrypting and
spectralizing the absent writer of the book accompanied by a speech turned
requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the end title
sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The film’s specters are
re/called at the end of tie-in screenplay book. The last two pages of the book show a
still taken from the film’s end title sequence of a book opening up after it has been
plunged into the water with the production and cast credits superimposed over the
left-hand page. See Figures 0 and 0.0, the verso and recto pages).
Figure 0 (verso page) Figure 0.0 (recto page)
Filming an adaptation of The Tempest allows Taymor to perform a paradoxical
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salvage operation of the book which is not salvific: precisely because the
drowning books are absent all paratext (no titles or authors are visible on the
covers), the book as a medium serves as a metaphorical storage unit for film, a
book cover like the metal canisters used to house rolls of film that contain, as it
were the author. This paradox may be vividly grasped in the book of the film The
tempest, with the author listed as “Julie Taymor Adapted from the Play by William
Shakespeare”: in a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back
cover and page opposite, the film credits for the director and actors are printed
just to left of an “uncredited” book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding
it. The book of the film shows a nameless book while also recording Taymor as
the film’s author: the weirdly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of
hybrid authorship-- crediting Shakespeare as her source appears and disappears
in the fold of the of the book as one turns the page and then, presumably, closes
the book. Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books
makes them unreadable even though the pages are open.
Ariel’s bee song transposed from 51. 87-94 to just before Prospero’s “ My Ariel,
chick ,’That is thy charge.” 5.1. 316
Taymor cuts “Please you draw near.”
Crux of lack of a stage exit for Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo, p 305, Arden 3.
Miranda: The sky it seems, would pour down stinking pitch
But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek
Dashes the fire out. 1.2.4-5
Alonso: That they were, I wish
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Myself were muddied in that oozy bed
Where my son lies. 5.1. 150-52
Upon this shore when you were wrecked, was landed
To be king on’t. 5.1.161-62
Ariel says he “landed” the survivors; the passive construction here is rather odd
—“who landed” could easily work—but “was landed” is not just “landed” but implies
a missing agent—someone or some force “landed” Prospero.
Sleep versus awake is a strong binary opposition in 1.2. Miranda put to sleep and at
the end when the boatswain is awakened but his sailors are asleep.
There thou shat find the mariners asleep
Under the hatches. The master and the boatswain
Being awake, During the play, sleep and waking blur, sleeping and death, even
sleepy language.
Taymor’s audiocommentary
When you do the play onstage, the cell is off stage, so you never see it. But when you
do a movie (on sequence before A, A, S and G wander (they awoke earlier).
She says the set by the pool is like “an open book,” the white walls like pages.
[PBS Masterpiece] montage of turning blank pages with faces of stars superimposed.
Red cover and blank pages, open book at the end of the logo sequence]
No books in Prospera’s flashbacks, just alchemy and the funeral of her dead
husband, the duke. She now inherits the post. Taymor says that “in the original
play, Prospero reads his books and therefore loses control. Seems like a good
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reason, but we . . .”she stresses alchemy because as a witch you could be burned;
you could be burned for alchemy—“set to sea presumably to die”
The question “Is there a book or not?” assumes we know what a book is. We want to
ask a different question Gets at hunatotexuality og Prospeor’s Books, not their
resumed materiality.
Burn but his books versus I’ll drown my books. The book is and is not there, but it is
imagnined takes two very different forms.
Spectrality takes us ot bio—different notion of the island—mangaement of life and
eath—ut with a n economy of loss without loss.
Fake death in Much Ado About Nothing—not directed at the female body,
purification.
Chief focus will be on Taymor’s tempest in art because tshe shows the books
“drowning in the end title sequence.
Made me think that Prospero too is among the living dead—every third thought
shall be my grave—kind of like Robinson Crusoe for Derrida—not fear of being
buried alive, but fear of burying alive or burning alive. Drowning as neurotic
compromise formation. He can live on only because he is as spectral as he is human.
His wife died in childbirth—embryonic fluids? Miranda’s birth as another kind of
shipwreck?
The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.There are two shots of books "drowning." There is also shot of theship burning in the distance.
The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot of
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it fully restored in a harbor.
The film is good for us in that it highlights the play's not soobvious opposition between burning and drowning.The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I amrealizing. Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down andProspero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, whocontradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarlyreassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to thesurvivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--Ihad forgotten that.
Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's noflashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of herlibrary WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)on the boat in which they are set adrift.
Just wondering f the issue of the book not being a prop and being bothsingular and plural is related to drowning as a figure for thedisappearance of the prompt book in production--or its being a prompt(there, but invisible, off-stage).So The Tempest as a kind of tele-prompter / ing?No book burning there, but also no bookdestruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; nofigurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I itwritten")
Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running; The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fireShot of Prospara in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm and after the ship as sunk.No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Airel surrounded by fire too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing it burning.
Boat burning versus book burning.Ariel quotes Ferdinand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)But are they safe?Not a hair perished.
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Look. The ship is hidden. So we see the ship in harbor completely restored. Taymor wildly accelerated what we learn only in the final scene of the play, giving us even more reassurance, defaulting the audience to her Ariel-centric reading of the play, as if the audience were Ariel.
Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward tracing.Flashack of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to Prospera with background of forest splashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.“invisible to every eyeball else”
Porspera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our wood.Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.
Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” linesProspera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in Gladiator.
Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdinand hearing ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots, “Where should this music be?Follow it or rather it has drawn me, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Ferdinand is walking—close ups of both Ariel and FerdinandThe ballad does remember my drowned father.The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Ariel from the “real” human characters.
Myself am Naples, ever since my father.
Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in sots of Ferdinand and Miranda. “I charge thee that thou attend me.”(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—doe’st thou mark?”—Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? Tat she has to keep replacing it, redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if Miranda is listening or not?
Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre early modern, I guess. Rags, not ood pulp as source of paper.
Cut to fire in Prospera—“so lie there my art”
Prospera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.
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Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or in focus with racking focus.
Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks in bluish hue. Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the books?) here is also a chest in her boat.Boatswain is blackMusic sounds a like Nymanish
Foul water shalt thy drink
Prospera’s Books
DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never holds her books, no library.
Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same economy of destruction and restoration—through “made wet”Burns cross over from prop to non prop from burning to drowning. “drown my books” last se of “drown” in the play?
Dream/Re/Work
End credits:Books fall—music—then a woman sings the epilogue to a minor key song—afer producer credit Visual effects supervisor Kyle Cooper“which was to please”followed guitar—then “now I want spirits to informcast members show
to title The TempestA Julie Taymor filmAnd cones to below the end the line credits books have Laurence Sterne marble covers“let your indulgence (repeated)last book disappearssets me freeNow I want spirits to inform” and the epilogue repeats released by prayerMore guitar—also a lead guitar-builds louder, same loopNow I want spirits begins over again
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By prayer . .which pierces so, pierces that it assaults, mercy itself and frees . . PauseA’as you from faults from
Coda Betha WilliamsLet your indulgence, let your indulgence set me free as final credits appea adnd copyright.
One last book—big—with extra pages, then sound, then an icon with a page, three more icons, then warning,Antipiracy warning
Theater as transcendental object. Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that make the diegesis collapse. “Homo fuge” moment. All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world. You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.
Prospera’s Bu(t)chdrowning books burn in Greenaway's P's Books Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.Toy boat. Water is all over the film. The shipwreck is written in bluish waterthat is supposed to be ink.
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Toyboat.
The shot above of the book is rather theological—apocalyptic but in a perverse way—Amen.
The word “creature”—Ferdinand called creature by Prospero to Miranda. “Thing od darkness” Caliban. Animal and Ariel—where the bee sucks there suck I.Lacan on bees reading in Seminar Book XX, chapter 4. [A;lo bees disappearing due to isecticides that mess up the pollen and hten disorient the bees so that they can’t make it back a-hive. Puts the B in Bare life.
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Speech—taught me language—Ferdinand—you speak my language. Man as speaking animal—but animal also speaks—so do spirits.
Ariel talks about the ship on fire—burning—rather than sinking, getting overwhelmed by waves.
Le Livre Ivre
Caliban as drunken Symbolist poet—ban ban ca ca caliban. Kissing the bottle as kissing the book.
In German TV Der Sturm, Ariel comes out dressed in the identical clothes Prospera is dressed in when Ariel says in English—modernized, not Shakespeare—the bit about how Prospero should forgive his enemies.
“We could isolate the flashbacks . . . color of blue and force perspective and
miniatures in the flashbacks to separate them from the present, in which we used
naturalistic colors.”
Ariel on shipwreck “I divide and burn in many places”
In the published screenplay,
“INT. LIBRARY – DUSK
The room is filled with Prospera’s books. In the center of the small space the young
lovers play chess . . .” 160
Graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let ‘em forth
By my so potent art.
EXT. HIGH PROMONONTORY OVER LOOKING THE OCAEAN – NIGHT
As promised, PROSPERA throws her staff of the cliff and watches it shatter into
millions of pieces on the rocks below.
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Prospera’s books sink slowly one by one into the deep, black sea as the main credits
begin. A haunting female voice sings Prospera’s last speech.
Miranda to Prospero, I.2.
“Wherefore did they not that hour destroy us?”
Caliban: “Nor lead me, like a firebrand in the dark,” 2.2. 6
Boatswain: “We were dead of sleep.”
Stephano: Com on your ways, open your mouth. Here is that which will give
language to you, cat. 2.2. 81-82-echoes Caliban’s “you gave me language” to Miranda.
Trinculo: I should know that voice. It should be—but he is drowned, And these are
devils. 2.2. 86-87
Alonso speaking about Ferdinand: He is drowned
Whom we stray to find, and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. 3.3.8-10
Ariel as harpy:
The never surfeited sea
Hath caused to belch you up3.3.55-56
Thee of thy son, Alonso
In film, magic banquet has animals and fruits and then leaves follow out from it and
then crows or ravens and then Ariel.
Audiocommentary over chess scene—the board is made of sand, meant to recall the
sandcastle at the beginning; the chess pieces are made of rock and coral.
No books are visible in these shots of M and F playing chess, contrary to the
published screenplay.
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Miranda no longer wearing leggings but a dress (to indicate her return to Europe,
according to Taymor.
“Lava dogs, the bees are not in the original script but you can see better how Ariel is
doing P’s bidding from scene to scene.”
Usually, she doesn’t have the confrontation between Caliban and Prospero—he is
looking directly at the stick. Shot reverse shots in close ups—“he leaves and does
not look back, forever free,” cut back to extreme close up of Prospera (like rough
magic sequence).
“I rearranged where this song happens.”
Another long take until “there I “ and see kaleidoscope in one of her earlier visions
so that he would just become water again.
“And do the murder first” 4.1.432 The part about burning Prospero’s books drops
out.
Ariel as harpy:
But remember
. . that you three
From Milan did supplant good Prospero,
Exposed unto the sea, which hath requite it,
Him and his foul deed” 3.3.68-72
Prospero “When I have decked the sea with drops fall salt” 1.2. 155
Mine eyes, ev’n sociable to the show of thine,
Fall fellowly drops. 5.1.63-64
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The se-change is a form of encrustation—what dissolves becomes permanent-dones
coral, eyes, pearsl. Almost like a sonnet. What is the tense of “are”? Have been made
(as in “are now changed completely”)? Or present? As in “are now being changed, in
the process of”)
Ariel shot in slow-motion—Ben W had to reloop his voice so that iw ould match the
Cut back to Proserpa—you can see a book on her table, but she is turned away from
it. slow motion.
on table—omnivorous. Ariel’s harpy sequence activated by shots of Propsera
dropping a black feather in a glass calchemical bottle. Which turns blue (like ink)
and hten close up of he bottle as water explodes out of it.
They hath bereft thee, and do pronounce by me,
Linger’ng perdition, worse than any death 3.3-75-77
Like supposed destruction a means of speculation on disposal of corpses, sleep is a
kind f suspended animation or cryonic freezing. Prospero puts Miranda asleep.
Ariel later makes Gonzalo and Antonio sleep. Ariel has the men in the ship sleep.
Caliban questions most acutely the border between sleeping and waking.
Sebastian’s a “very sleepy language.”
Repetition of you gave me language.
Even language is not awake.
No print of goodness take versus printless feet.
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Mannoni mentions The Tempest in connection to Robinson Cruose, but nt the
footprints.
the destruction of the ship itself is both water and fire.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,As I foretold you, were all spirits andAre melted into air, into thin air:And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,The solemn temples, the great globe itself,Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolveAnd, like this insubstantial pageant faded,Leave not a rack behind.
Wipe thou thine eyes; have comfort.The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'dThe very virtue of compassion in thee,I have with such provision in mine artSo safely ordered that there is no soul--No, not so much perdition as an hairBetid to any creature in the vesselWhich thou heard'st cry, which thou saw'st sink. Sit down;For thou must now know farther.
Bring in Lucretius on the shipwreck?
PROSPEROBut are they, Ariel, safe?ARIELNot a hair perish'd;On their sustaining garments not a blemish,But fresher than before: and, as thou badest me,In troops I have dispersed them 'bout the isle.The king's son have I landed by himself;Whom I left cooling of the air with sighsIn an odd angle of the isle and sitting,His arms in this sad knot.PROSPEROOf the king's shipThe mariners say how thou hast disposedAnd all the rest o' the fleet.ARIEL
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Safely in harbourIs the king's ship; in the deep nook, where onceThou call'dst me up at midnight to fetch dewFrom the still-vex'd Bermoothes, there she's hid:The mariners all under hatches stow'd;Who, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,I have left asleep; and for the rest o' the fleetWhich I dispersed, they all have met againAnd are upon the Mediterranean flote,Bound sadly home for Naples,Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'dAnd his great person perish.
Ariel repeats Prospero’s reference to a “hair.”
FERDINANDWhere should this music be? i' the air or the earth?It sounds no more: and sure, it waits uponSome god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,Weeping again the king my father's wreck,This music crept by me upon the waters,Allaying both their fury and my passionWith its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.No, it begins again.
PROSPEROHow? the best?What wert thou, if the King of Naples heard thee?FERDINANDA single thing, as I am now, that wondersTo hear thee speak of Naples. He does hear me;And that he does I weep: myself am Naples,Who with mine eyes, never since at ebb, beheldThe king my father wreck'd.
ALONSOIf thou be'st Prospero,Give us particulars of thy preservation;How thou hast met us here, who three hours since
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Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost--How sharp the point of this remembrance is!--My dear son Ferdinand.PROSPEROI am woe for't, sir.ALONSOIrreparable is the loss, and patienceSays it is past her cure.PROSPEROI rather thinkYou have not sought her help, of whose soft graceFor the like loss I have her sovereign aidAnd rest myself content.ALONSOYou the like loss!PROSPEROAs great to me as late; and, supportableTo make the dear loss, have I means much weakerThan you may call to comfort you, for IHave lost my daughter.ALONSOA daughter?O heavens, that they were living both in Naples,The king and queen there! that they were, I wishMyself were mudded in that oozy bedWhere my son lies. When did you lose your daughter?PROSPEROIn this last tempest. I perceive these lordsAt this encounter do so much admireThat they devour their reason and scarce thinkTheir eyes do offices of truth, their wordsAre natural breath: but, howsoe'er you haveBeen justled from your senses, know for certainThat I am Prospero and that very dukeWhich was thrust forth of Milan, who most strangelyUpon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was landed,To be the lord on't. No more yet of this;For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,Not a relation for a breakfast norBefitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir;This cell's my court: here have I few attendantsAnd subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.My dukedom since you have given me again,I will requite you with as good a thing;At least bring forth a wonder, to content yeAs much as me my dukedom.
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Here PROSPERO discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess
ANTONIOThus, sir:Although this lord of weak remembrance, this,Who shall be of as little memoryWhen he is earth'd, hath here almost persuade,--For he's a spirit of persuasion, onlyProfesses to persuade,--the king his son's alive,'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'dAnd he that sleeps here swims.SEBASTIANI have no hopeThat he's undrown'd.
The seven-minute-long end title sequence of Taymor’s Tempest, designed by Kyle
Cooper, however, gives expressive form to the moment when Prospero ‘drowns’ his
book: as the credits roll and the camera is submerged under water, we watch
Prospera’s books (in plural form) fall slowly through the ocean heading toward the
bottom musically accompanied by a haunting version of Shakespeare’s epilogue
scored by Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor originally cut Prospero’s epilogue from the film
script but ended up restoring it. In The Tempest, the book published as a companion
piece to the film, Taymor writes:
The film’s last image of Prospera on the ocean cliff, her back to the camera,
tossing her magic staff to the dark rocks below, and the staff’s subsequent
shattering, is the ending. But when all was cut and timed and scored and
mixed, the rhythm of the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete. I asked
Elliott [Goldenthal] to take these last great words [the epilogue] and set
them to music for the seven-minute-long end-title sequence. And to that
haunting female vocal, sung by Beth Gibbons. The credits rolled and we
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drowned the books of Prospera in the deep dark sea. (21)14
Taymor enlarges authorial agency beyond the individual in the ‘Rough Magic’
preface to the book, writing that ‘we drowned the books of Prospera’). (p. 21) Yet
this enlargement of cinematic authorship depends on not only shifting Propsoero’s
“rough magic” speech to the end of the film as Prospera’s ventriloquized “Coda,”(p.
1
BEGIN
WITH AN ASSUMPTION ABOUT THE TEMPEST that opens onto a set
of related questions. The assumption is that among the highly
valued books that Prospero brought with him into exile is one book
essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult
before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one
that near the end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his
magic. Though Peter Greenaway, in his film Prospero’s Books, did
not include such a book among the twenty-four he decided were
necessary for Prospero’s survival,1 the text indicates that Prospero
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21) but on the final credits. Because “the end of the film felt truncated, incomplete, I
asked Elliot [Goldenthal] to take those last great words and set them to music for
the seven-minute-long end title sequence” (21) during we witness the visualized
consequences of Prospera’s declaration of her intent to ‘drown’ her ‘books’ . . I read
Taymor’s film as an allegory of the immersion of the book into a residual paratexual
storage space, sending off her film and accommodating a readerly and spectatorial
not only has a magic robe and a magic staff (both of which are
explicitly called for2), but, like Friar Bacon and Doctor Faustus
and other stage magicians before him, he also has a magic book.
Further, the play presents Prospero’s always-offstage book as
crucial to his rule over the island, the magical instrument that
enables him to control the spirits who come from their confines
when Prospero calls, who torment Caliban and keep him obedient,
and who assume as needed the shapes of Greek mythological
figures or vicious hunting dogs.
Granted, the play emphasizes Prospero’s use of spirits much more than it does his dependence on a particular book for the power to so use them. By the time he says“I’ll to my book, / For yet ere suppertime must I perform / Much business” (3.1.113–15), we know without a doubt that Prospero employs materialized spirits to carry out his commands. (1)
67
desire for an authorial force by encrypting and spectralizing the absent writer of the
book. She accompanies this allegorical depiction of displaced authorship with a
speech-turned-requiem sung by a female extra-diegetic voice identified only in the
end credit sequence rather than spoken by Helen Mirren (Prospera). The authorial
specters of the film are re/called at the end of the tie-in screenplay book. The last
They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
(3.2.100–104)
Prospero’s spirit magic is thus established early and unequivocally, long before we see groups of spirits actually appear. In contrast, not until Prospero’s exit line,“I’ll to my book,” at the end of 3.1 does the text point to a specific book connected with Prospero’s magic “business.” Further, in only one speech is Prospero’s control of spir- its explicitly linked to his book, and that speech refers to his books in the plural:
Remember First to possess his books, for without them
He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath notOne spirit to command. They all do hate him As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.
(3.2.100–104)
The use here of the plural seems to argue against the significance of any particular book—though surely it is relevant that the speech gives us Caliban’s interpretation of Prospero’s use of his library, and that Prospero himself, in later referring to the instruments that have made possible his magic, uses the singular form: “I’ll break my staff, / . . . And deeper than did ever plummet sound, / I’ll drown my book” (5.1.63, 65–66)—a promise he seems, by play’s end, to have kept, since he describes himself in the Epilogue as being in much the state that Caliban had earlier predicted, without
68
two pages of the book show a still taken from the film’s closing credit sequence of a
book opening up after it has been plunged into the water with the production and
cast credits superimposed over the left-hand page. (Figures X.1 and X.2 [the verso
and recto pages].)
one spirit to command.
The first and most obvious question that Shakespeare scholars will ask is why, if the play suggests even equivocally that Prospero has a magic book for the control of spirits, is there so little scholarly curiosity about this book today?
(3)
But even those twentieth-century scholars who tried to take the magic seriously tended to be silent about Prospero’s book.11
(4)
This new interest in conjuring books raises the next question about Prospero’s book—namely, if we grant the likelihood that Prospero has some version of a manuscript magic book, what are we to imagine that the book contains? We can move toward a tentative answer by looking first at the contents of actual magic books, though we will see later that Prospero’s putative book departs significantly from them. G
(8)
69
At the same time, however, Prospero’s book is not a grimoire—or at least so it seems today. While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the con- tents of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.
The significant point here is that, for an early-seventeenth-century audience of The Tempest, Prospero’s references to his “book” and Caliban’s allusions to Prospero as a “magician” and a “sorcerer” would, by placing Prospero in the category of “magician” or “white witch,” have constructed him as a natural enemy of Sycorax.69 This possibility encourages a fresh look at the play in terms of Prospero’s connections back to the Virgil and Solomon magician figures and out to the users of grimoires in Shakespeare’s own day, and it may be especially fruitful in terms of the magician/witch enmity that manifests in Prospero’s antipathy to (even the memory of ) Sycorax. 70 While further research by historians of magic may alter this conclusion, the con- tents of Prospero’s book, as reflected in his language and actions, must be imagined as departing in significant ways from extant grimoires.
70
In a paratextual space usually left blank, namely, the inside back cover and facing
page, the film credits for the director and actors are printed just to the left of an
‘uncredited’ book falling though water, little bubbles surrounding it. The book of the
film thus showcases a book displaying neither title nor author while simultaneously
The real, historical reader “would have” is no less ideal than “the” ahistorical reader of reader response criticism.
It is based on a functionalist model of cognition—eveyrone sees it. Complete transparency. Unused Readers
Roiented to further research, a s=s if there would come a point when that could happen or ever has happened. As if there is always a march of progress.
But just as The Tempest is more than a play about a magician, so Prospero’s book, within the play’s larger context of epic sea journeys and contem- porary Mediterranean/Atlantic voyages, has an additional resonance that at first seems quite other than that carried by the grimoires. That resonance attaches to it in terms of the larger power of the book per se.
Prospero says of Gonzalo,“Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my duke- dom” (1.2.198–200), P
As a grimoire—and even more so as a stage-prop grimoire—its historical moment seems much further in the past and its baggage strangely lighter. But it opens up a host of questions about Prospero and his magic, many of which must remain unan- swered until we know more about manuscript conjuring books.
32
Within the frame of literacy as civilization and as power, however, the decision is more ambiguous. When, as in Greenaway’s film,
71
recording Taymor as the film’s ‘author’ (asserted via her writer, director and
producer multiple credits here in combination with the ‘Julie Taymor Adapted from
the Play by William Shakespeare’ authorial designation on the volume’s front
cover): the interstingly double move in which Taymor claims a kind of hybrid
authorship - crediting Shakespeare as her source - appears and disappears as one
we see Prospero’s books— leather-bound, gorgeous, their pages yielding all the world’s mythologies, its temples, its art, its histories—their destruction seems, to lovers of books and admirers of Western civilization, both problematic and poignant. To those who instead share Caliban’s view of Prospero, who see Prospero as little more than a tyrant and Western civilization as little more than tyranny, the destruction of the book may be more a matter of celebration. Such a divided response to the play today seems almost inevitable, forcing the early-twenty-first-century viewer/reader to grapple with the meanings of literacy, of history, of civilization, and to confront the clash of values and of worlds implied in The Tempest’s larger story.
(32)
So she reroutes the destruction of the book back through colonialism and Greenblatt.
And Greenblatt, providing a context for Caliban’s “Burn but his books,” recounts the story told by Claude Duret in 1607 about the Hurons who “were convinced that we [Europeans] were sorcerers, imposters come to take possession of their country, after having made them perish by our spells, which were shut up in our inkstands, in our books, etc.—inasmuch that we dared not, without hiding ourselves, open a book or write anything.”85 (30)
2
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turns the page and then, presumably, closes the book. By focusing on the books
opening as they fall underwater, Taymor invites us to ask a new question, namely,
Taymor quietly insists on the drowning Prospera’s unidentifiable books makes them
unreadable even though the pages are open.
3 Survivance—as a structuring structure that generates a series of differences that
matter or don’t according to at various historical moments, what copy you have,
what language it is in, what edition, hardcover or paperback, paper used, etc. and
revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Difference
between archival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can
be published.
4 Murnau film, Faust throws his book into afire; destroyed by insects; acid-free
paper again in Greenaway film. We might want to discuss the invisible blood
writing in Faustus too,
by way of contrast. No book brining there, but also no book
destruction, no tearing up a book, or tearing out a page; no
figurative desire, as in R and J, to "tear" a "name" ("Had I it
written")
Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about notgetting back to me. We could start with our different reading of thesame passage from Marlowe’s Faustus, if we wanted to do.
Greenaway’s piss streaming Ariel versus Marlowe’s blood-streaming?
Gallagher never did back to me, btw, after he got back to me about not
73
Taymor’s protracted endings. Propsera is literally cut off from her voice, her
promise already made off-camera and fulfilled, after, the end of the film, also in a
voice-over. The “O mistress mine” shot has a different kind of incongruity that
nevertheless makes the : the singing is of course dubbed in post-production, but it’s
not clear whether the voice is the actors; at points, it look like he is lip-synching.
getting back to me. We could start with our different reading of the
same passage, if we wanted to do.
Hi Lowell (and Julian),
I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it
even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing
your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay
behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :)
Julian, please contribute at will. :)
The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la
lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign
the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation
between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs
for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of
after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide
the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go
into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean?
74
This Across the Universe moment has includes some superimposition. But the real
oddity is that the song is taken from another play that of course has a parallel (the
shipwreck and mistaken believe that a loved one has drowned) but Feste makes no
sense in context since Ferdinand has his mistress.
O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?
The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down,
hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my
time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is
the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--
but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in theB text). What de Man would
call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of ucanny effect
you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of
blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.
The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material /
messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The
congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one
could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny
before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm")
would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut
mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to
fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm,
which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor
could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked
75
O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming That can sing both high and low; Trip no further, pretty sweeting, Journeys end in lovers’ meeting— Every wise man’s son doth know. What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What’s to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty,—
about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are
already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am
not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we
have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means
here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not
specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was
repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the
blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?
So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood
writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we
get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus,
repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far
for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is
not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well
as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot
receive Jesus.
In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the
76
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene III (1602)15
Rough magic follows her creating a ring of fire around her as she says “Ye elves” and
also has some superimposed flashbacks in montage form.
The film ends with a series of liberations also not in the play:1. After the Europeans exit, Prospero lets Caliban go. No dialogue. Just lots of
paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is
"given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . ,
by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"
Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.
So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort
of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out:
Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"
Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us
uses "give" in his response:
"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"
"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.
You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if
77
cutting back and forth until we see Caliban walking up the steps of the cell and getting away.2. Propsera then lets Aerial go.3. She then fulfills her promise, as if letting herself go--throws staffAnd then "dissolve" into end titles and books.
Sets up anonymess.
Marlowes notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts
(which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less
latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily
uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record
to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only
Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At
least not for sure.
P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and
non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.
Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-
sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.
Theater as transcendental object.
Inventory moments in which the play letters on setting in motion a direction that
make the diegesis collapse.
“Homo fuge” moment.
78
Youtube toy Tempest video and the toyboat tempest in a bathtub scene in Prospero’s
Books.
Filling in the Blanks on FIlm
All moments are in a play world, not part of the real world.
You’re watching a kind of living death, character between Marlowe’s live and the
character’s lives or actor’s reanimation.
Hi Lowell (and Julian),
I taught your ELH essay today, and had a few more thoughts after rereading (I like it even more than I did before) regarding blood writing. Julian and I have discussing your essay on the phone. I have two sets of questions. If you have left the essay behind and have no interest in what I am writing, please feel free not to respond. :) Julian, please contribute at will. :)
The first set of questions bears on the streaming of blood (live streaming avant la lettre?). You note the connection between Faustus streams his blood to write / sign the deed of gift and Christ's blood-stream. I was thinking about the relation between congealing and dropping. The drop of blood, or half a drop Faustus longs for is, I think, an alternate response to the congealing of his own blood, a kind of after reading of the "homo, fuge" invisible ink inscribed on his arm. He can divide the blood as a way of streaming it and also stopping it. But is the drop going to go into Faustus or on him? Is he going to drink it? Or is it supposed to wash him clean? The drop seems to me not to fit into Faust’s topography--leap up, hold me down, hide in the earth, etc. Nor does it fit into his temporality (time is running out; my time is up). When is the drop going to drop? Why, exactly, doesn't it drop? What is the economy of the drop? Why can it be divided? God kicks in as he is stopping it--but if he is, then he is like Mephistopheles (esp in the B text). What de Man would call the formal materiality of inscription seems to have the kind of uncanny effect you discuss within the blood-streaming of time. The drop is another instance of blood writing, but a writing that does not write, or cannot write off, Faustus’s sins.
The second set of questions I have bear on how the uncanniness of material / messianic time is compressed in the signing / Homo, fuge scene itself. The congealing precedes Faust saying the same line twice. This is just reiteration one
79
We now turn to the endings of Taymor and Greenaway’s films. Here we examine
specific ways in which the closing sequences adapt the book written and the book
being written in ways that both unify the film and yet also complicate a sense of the
ending of film, of how complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and
the closing paratext begins, and so of when one can legitimately exit the cinema or
could rightly say. However, the scene of blood writing here is already uncanny before the blood congeals. The blood letting directed by the text ("cuts his arm") would not happen on stage. Nor would the actor actually do what Faust says: “I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood” And even if one were to try to use squibs to fake the cut, one would still be pretending to cut one's arm, not cutting one's arm, which is what the stage direction directs. And it is hard to imagine how the actor could fake cutting his arm and then fake the blood congealing. (Julian has talked about this with me.) So the language of the play and the body of the actor are already dislocated. Disabled, even. "I can write no more." I realize, btw, that I am not asking any questions. :) When we get to the "inscription" of "Homo, fuge," we have entered further into the uncanny. We do not know what inscription means here. Who wrote this? With what? blood? Ink? Invisible ink? The medium is not specified. Then "Homo, fuge" is repeated just as "Faustus gives to thee his soul" was repeated earlier. And mirroring or echoing the congealing and clear again of the blood, we get an inscription with visible / invisible ink / blood/ tattoo?
So my quasi-question bears on the centrality you give to congealing (and blood writing) as the caesura that derails ethics. Isn't the signing a problem as soon as we get "cuts his arm"? And doesn't uncanniness in various forms (para-deja vus, repetitions of structures, kick in before the signing is over. I am quite sure I am far for the first person to notice this, but Faust’s elision form the line he cites twice is not included in his reading of the contract / deed of gift. Blood is a medium as well as material. Faust cannot upload himself, cannot broadcast himself. He cannot receive Jesus.
In relation to the economy and medium of blood, I was wondering about the paradox of a deed of gift. The gift cannot be contracted. It is not a debt. Faustus is "given time." Yet not really. The deed inscribes a gift exchange: "I, John Faustus . . . , by these presents, do give both body and soul to Lucifer"
Body and soul is a phrase that is also repeated, btw.
So the uncanniness of the signing--congealing and inscription, gets sorted out, sort of (not), in the deed of gift. It becomes just a deed after he reads it out: Mephistopheles says "Speak, Faustus, do you deliver this as your deed?"
80
turn off the blu-ray player. Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the
end credits begin? Or is one compelled, for fearing of missing something, to stay
seated and keep watching even after ‘The End’? Such announcements of seeming
completion can sometimes, of course, be duplicitous, acting as teasing herald to
further moments in the textual / paratextual endings beyond ‘The End’ that loop
Odd that he is asked to speak since he has just been speaking. But then Faustus us uses "give" in his response:
"Ay, take it, and the devil give thee good on 't!"
"Deed of gift" has devolved into a kind of semic deed and asemic gift.
You suggest that blood recalls ink (pitch burned, sacrificial, etc). But I wonder if Marlowe’s notion of blood streaming changes our understanding of writing of texts (which you appear to be entirely semic) and ironizes or activates a more or less latent ironization of materiality and messianic time as always already uncannily uncanny. The spectral “precedes” the material. The text itself is a specter, a record to be repeated and (not, when it comes to blood) re-enacted or even shown (only Faustus sees the blood stream). The text does not know anything. Not even that. At least not for sure.
P.S. The hopeless inadequacy of Drucker’s binary opposition between matter and non-transcendental writing (Derrida’s trace?) makes itself apparent.
Faustus will never end, but he will not die. So the requests Faust makes us are non-sensical. A character contemplates its own end, it is not human.
5 Greenblatt “Martial Law in the Land of COcaigne” Strachey tells the story of a state of emergency and a crisis of authority” 149Greenblatt’s reading is also characterological and psychologizing (novelizing)—about inwardness and self-fsahioning, but especially about Prospero’s inwardness:
The entire action of the play rests on the premise that value lies in controlled uneasiness, and hence that a direct reappropriation of the usurped dukedom and a
81
back the closing paratext to the earlier text of the film. I address these questions
and others in a necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the
end sequences of Taymor abd Greenaway films paradoxically save the film author as
a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or disintegrating the book (auteur, you
will recall, means ‘author’ in French and has a much higher cultural status than the
direct punishment of the usurpers has les moral and political value than an elaborate inward restaging of loss, misery, and anxiety. Prospero directs this restaging not only against others but also—even principally—against himself.” 144Goes to subversion and containment: “The ideological effects of The Tempest are ambiguous” 155. The play supports Prospero’s authority and raises troubling questions about it.
Grenblatt ends his chapter by quoting at length Stanley Livingston’e story about how he offered his copy of Shakespeare to saved his notebook from being burned by African natives.
After Stanley’s death, the notebooks . . . were for many years presumed lost. But they were rediscovered. . Their publication revals something odd: while the the notebook entry for his stay at the Mowa records tht the natives were angry at his writing . . Stanley makes no mention of the burning of Shakespeare. Perhaps, to heighten the general interest with which he was concerned, he made up the story. 162-163
For Stanley, Shakespeare’s theater had become a book, and the book in turn had become a genial companion . . . . The anxiety in his account . . is relieved only when , as Caliban had hoped, the book is destroyed. But the destruction of he book only saves another, more practical, more deadly. And when he returned to London or New York, Stanley could always buy another copy (Chandon edition) of his genial companion.
6 Miguel de Cervantes, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote. Trans. Tobias Smollet, (1755 / 2001), 83.7 Burned mansucripts are a staple of literature: see Henry James, The Aspern Papers; Wilke Collins, The Haunted Hotel. Even Shelley’s death by drowning is never connected to his posthumously published poem, “The Triumph of Life.” of In The Post Card, Derrida’s correspondence is burned; elsewhere he refers to ash, cinders, and cremation.8 The Mason-Vaughans’ observe in their introduction to the Arden that the Tempest
has fewer cruxes than do the other plays in the First Folio, and in the section of their
Introduction devoted to “Cruxes,” they include only two, leaving the rest to the
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more everyday écrivain, or writer).
Prospera’s Books
notes. Strictly speaking, the first crux they include is not a crux at all: Whether the
lines in 1.2. about Caliban “Abhorred slave” are attributed to Prospero or to Miranda
is not in doubt in the text. The question has been raised in the play’s performance
and editing history. Restoration dramatists like Dryden and editors like Theobald
had no textual evidence to reassign Prospero’s lines to Miranda. They are amending
the text, not emending an error. We read the Arden 3’s classification of this
reassignment as a symptom, however, not simply an error of classification. The
number of cruxes is less important than the way cruxes in the play do or do not
become visible and the way editors and critics efface them. “Book” versus “books” is
one. The shift from burning to drowning might be another. Is “Prosper” rather than
“Prospero” a crux? If so, is it related to Caliban’s play with his name, “ban ban Ca
Caliban”? Under what conditions does something become a crux rather than a
general critical problem?
The Post Card, burn; The Aspern Papers;
Figure of the library at the beginning, when he’s on the boat, not drowning of
Prospero and Miranda or the books (Gonzalo’s help); the end of the play is a self-
authored return to a possibility to a possibility that the narrative has suggested but
not allowed that reverberates vis-a-vis Caliban’s desire to burn P’s books.
83
DVD menu loop shows everything happening as if underwater; the ship is shown
burning; there are two separate shots of books “drowning”; begins and ends with
Prospera; she is in close up at the end, eyes closed, then open, as if it had been her
dream; begins with low angle shot of her in her cloack with her staff—she never
holds her books, no library.
in Prospero’s Books.
PROSPERO
To have no screen between this part he play'd
And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan. Me, poor man, my library
Was dukedom large enough: of temporal royalties
He thinks me now incapable; confederates--
So dry he was for sway--wi' the King of Naples
To give him annual tribute, do him homage,
Subject his coronet to his crown and bend
The dukedom yet unbow'd--alas, poor Milan!--
To most ignoble stooping.
Wherefore did they not
That hour destroy us?
PROSPERO
Well demanded, wench:
My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst not,
So dear the love my people bore me, nor set
84
Or garments are as fresh (Gonzalo repeats what Ariel has already said). Same
eeconomy of destruction and resoration—through “made wet”
Burns cross over from prop to non propr from burning to drowning. “drown my
books” last se of “drow” in the play?
A mark so bloody on the business, but
With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark,
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepared
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,
Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit it: there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us, to sigh
To the winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.
MIRANDA
Alack, what trouble
Was I then to you!
PROSPERO
O, a cherubim
Thou was’t that did preserve me. Thou didst smile.
Infused with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd the sea with drops full salt,
85
Dream/Re/Work
Kindle
The Tempest
Under my burthen groan'd; which raised in me
An undergoing stomach, to bear up
Against what should ensue.
MIRANDA
How came we ashore?
PROSPERO
By Providence divine.
Some food we had and some fresh water that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, being then appointed
Master of this design, did give us, with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gentleness,
Knowing I loved my books, he furnish'd me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.
MIRANDA
Boatswain
86
Fauxsimile done away with Prospero—techno-magical fantasy of seeing with a
master eye done away with but conserved because it’s done away.
Bringing back materiality and book history not in a kind of boring way but in an
interesting way. Nice way to shift the question that Mowat is asking—what is the
book? To what is the fate of the book? The destruction and fate “Unpacking My
Down with the topmast! yare! lower, lower! Bring
her to try with main-course.
A cry within
A plague upon this howling! they are louder than
the weather or our office.
Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO
Yet again! what do you here? Shall we give o'er
and drown? Have you a mind to sink?
SEBASTIAN
A pox o' your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,
incharitable dog!
Boatswain
Work you then.
ANTONIO
Hang, cur! hang, you whoreson, insolent noisemaker!
We are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.
87
Library,” Destination and Drowning; or destinerrance—destructibility of the letter
—divisibility versus destruction (defaults to the trope of burning or tearing the
paper or the support up). In coming back to Materiality and the prop we also to the
question of the support for Derrida.
GONZALO
I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks he
hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is
perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his
hanging: make the rope of his destiny our cable,
for our own doth little advantage. If he be not
born to be hanged, our case is miserable.
Exeunt
GONZALO
I'll warrant him for drowning; though the ship were
no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an
unstanched wench.
GONZALO
The king and prince at prayers! let's assist them,
For our case is as theirs.
SEBASTIAN
I'm out of patience.
88
What is drowning a book?
No special effects when Prospera spies on Miranda and Ferdunand .
A kind winter light on the location—lots of long shadows.
ANTONIO
We are merely cheated of our lives by drunkards:
This wide-chapp'd rascal--would thou mightst lie drowning
The washing of ten tides!
GONZALO
He'll be hang'd yet,
Though every drop of water swear against it
And gape at widest to glut him.
A confused noise within: 'Mercy on us!'-- 'We split, we split!'--'Farewell, my wife and
children!'-- 'Farewell, brother!'--'We split, we split, we split!'
FERDINAND
Where should this music be? i' the air or the earth?
It sounds no more: and sure, it waits upon
Some god o' the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the king my father's wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air: thence I have follow'd it,
89
Special effects when Ariel comes in and spies on Gonzalo etc and puts Gonzalo to
sleep. Then Alonso goes to sleep. Only bried shots of Ariel and then just music.
“strange drowsiness” drowsi and drown?
sleepy language
Ariel appears only when Sebastian ad Antonio draw and prepare to murder.
Or it hath drawn me rather. But 'tis gone.
No, it begins again.
ARIEL sings
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
Burthen Ding-dong
Hark! now I hear them,--Ding-dong, bell.
FERDINAND
The ditty does remember my drown'd father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.
90
[The film gets boring once we get to Caliban, then trinculo, then Stephano. Turns
into filmed theater. Conversation between S and A cots reverse shots gradually
cutting into closer and closer close ups. The editing is supposed to intensify the
drama.
Drown and dorwsy—sleep and drowning
SEBASTIAN
I have no hope
That he's undrown'd.
ANTONIO
O, out of that 'no hope'
What great hope have you! no hope that way is
Another way so high a hope that even
Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,
But doubt discovery there. Will you grant with me
That Ferdinand is drown'd?
STEPHANO
What's the matter? Have we devils here? Do you put
tricks upon's with savages and men of Ind, ha? I
have not scaped drowning to be afeard now of your
four legs; for it hath been said, As proper a man as
ever went on four legs cannot make him give ground;
and it shall be said so again while Stephano
breathes at's nostrils.
91
Ariel shows up “thou liest” behind Trinculo. He appears and disappears.
When he sleeps thou cans’t knock his [Prospero] head down. Having first seized her
books. But remember first to possess her books first.
Burn but her books and that most deeply consider is the beauty of her daughter.
SHOTS OF ARIEL SEPRATE FROM SHOTS OF HUMANS.
TRINCULO
I should know that voice: it should be--but he is
drowned; and these are devils: O defend me!
TRINCULO
I took him to be killed with a thunder-stroke. But
art thou not drowned, Stephano? I hope now thou art
not drowned. Is the storm overblown? I hid me
under the dead moon-calf's gaberdine for fear of
the storm. And art thou living, Stephano? O
Stephano, two Neapolitans 'scaped!
STEPHANO
I prithee now, lead the way without any more
talking. Trinculo, the king and all our company
else being drowned, we will inherit here: here;
bear my bottle: fellow Trinculo, we'll fill him by
and by again.
92
Calbian isle full of noises—sleep and sleep again when asked I cried to dream again.
Between S,T, and C abd A,A<, G, and S, shots of Prospero’s in cell—controlling the
weather—a cn ecipse
Special effect for the banquet, but small part of the screen.
STEPHANO
My man-monster hath drown'd his tongue in sack:
for my part, the sea cannot drown me; I swam, ere I
could recover the shore, five and thirty leagues off
and on. By this light, thou shalt be my lieutenant,
monster, or my standard.
ALONSO
Old lord, I cannot blame thee,
Who am myself attach'd with weariness,
To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.
Even here I will put off my hope and keep it
No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd
Whom thus we stray to find, and the sea mocks
Our frustrate search on land. Well, let him go.
ARIEL
You are three men of sin, whom Destiny,
That hath to instrument this lower world
And what is in't, the never-surfeited sea
93
Prospera puts a feather in a glass, it bursts, a bird flies out, turns into Ariel as harpy
with small boobs. His cloak is like Prospera’s. But remember.
Feathers fall in the background, kind of like books in water. Special effects as
Antonio and Sebastian and Alonso try to fight off the crows that Ariel turns into—
then Prospero crows “they are all within my power. Go bring the rabble.
Hath caused to belch up you; and on this island
Where man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst men
Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad;
And even with such-like valour men hang and drown
Their proper selves.
PROSPERO
Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou
Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring:
Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated
In what thou hadst to say: so, with good life
And observation strange, my meaner ministers
Their several kinds have done. My high charms work
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions; they now are in my power;
And in these fits I leave them, while I visit
Young Ferdinand, whom they suppose is drown'd,
And his and mine loved darling.
94
Ferdinand sings “O mistress mine” long take—like Taymor’s Universe movie.
Ariel’s head on frog that leaps out after Trinculo falls into a pool.
No tongue all eyes be silent
Prospero waves her staff toward the sky—stars / constellations sequence also a
background behind M and F
CALIBAN
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean
To dote thus on such luggage? Let's alone
And do the murder first: if he awake,
From toe to crown he'll fill our skins with pinches,
Make us strange stuff.
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.
GONZALO
95
Like a kaleidoscope/ Superimposed over Prospera. So there is no masque in the
film. Twelfth Night song displaces it.
Our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Prospero does not make eye contact with Ariel most of the time.
Burning dogs chance down Caliban—Ariel also seen with fire behind him.
Shortly shall all my labors end.
Be it so! Amen!
Re-enter ARIEL, with the Master and Boatswain amazedly following
O, look, sir, look, sir! here is more of us:
I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,
This fellow could not drown. Now, blasphemy,
That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on shore?
Hast thou no mouth by land? What is the news?
Boatswain
The best news is, that we have safely found
Our king and company; the next, our ship--
Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split--
Is tight and yare and bravely rigg'd as when
We first put out to sea.
EPILOGUE
SPOKEN BY PROSPERO
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
96
Shot of eclipse again.
Their senses I shall restore. And they shall be themselves
“printless feet”
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.
97
Sets a ring of fire around her after sot of the eclipse passing. The fire becomes faking
—back screen fast-forward montage, time-lapse photography of clouds, ends at “by
my so potent art.”
Burning dogs and burning fire around Ariel’s face and burning of the ship and the
fire around Ariel’s face. In the shipwreck (seen twice in the film, the second as a
9 Ibid; 198-99; Parages, Paris: Galilée, 1986, 219-47; to 227. Derrida’s practice of
using “faux-tires,” of “half titles” in The Post Card. Peggy Kamuf has a footnote on
"faux-titres" in Derrida’s Given Time: 1: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf,
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 198) 94 n. 16: “In typography, a ‘faux-titre’ is a
half title or bastard title. (Trans.)” Transliterated into English, “faux-titre” means
“false title.”
On Derrida’s interest in the archive and the shift from print to electronic media, see
Richard Burt, "Life Supports: 'Paperless' People, the New Media Archive, and the
Hold of Reading," in New Formations special issue on "Materialities of Text: Between
the Codex and the Net," eds. Nicholas Toburn and Says May. Forthcoming, 2013.
Survivance—as a structuring structure that generates a series of differences that
matter or don’t according to at various historical moments, what copy you have,
what language it is in, what edition, hardcover or paperback, paper used, etc. and
revivified by the reader. Wetwares storage notion of the archive. Difference
between archival materials and their publication—recursive since new editions can
be published.
98
montage and flashback) the ship catches on fire. But the play references fire only
when Ariel tells Prospero about it.
Economy of special effects in the film. Saved for Ariel and Prospera—only Ariel and
other charades when he hers them into the cell near the end of the film.
Assumption is that paper only is paper once it is written on—only papers with
writing in the ordinary sense can be archived. But move from archive to publication
introduces media that remediate the archival materials.
Sur-vivance of living dead book.From corpus of book to corpse of author, reader on the side of live. Turn to account
of survivance and posthumous publication.
What is commonly called the “afterlife” of a book is given a more technical meaning
whereby survival as a metaphor for preservation becomes a notional term, “sur-
vivance.” The translators of Derrida in The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 2 leave the
French neologism untranslated and without annotation apart from informing the
reader the “words ‘living on,’ ‘to survive,’ and ‘survival’ are in English in the text.”
(131,n30).
Survivance is, in a sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a
sense that is not thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death.
(130). The book is not exactly a corpse that continues to live, as it were, as it
decomposes or is put to various medical uses before being buried or cremated.
In Robinson Crusoe, Robinson Crusoe himself, both the Robinson Crusoe who speaks
and the one keeping a journal, all that they—there are already a lot of them-might
99
No special effects for rough magic; almost one for O Mistress mine; and perhaps
none for the last shot.
The books not drowning—I’ll drown them and given by Gonzalo at offs with the
widespread any characters have of another character drowning. A character thought
have desired is that the book, and in it the journal, outlive them: that might outlive
Defoe, and the character called Robinson Crusoe . . . . Now this survival, thanks to
which the book bearing its title has come down to us, has been read and will be read,
interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated filmed, kept alive by
millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As is indeed
with any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, buried alive and swallowed
up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all techne, and in it of
any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each
time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or
deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality
virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and
the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful
death. That’s also finitude, the chance and the threat of finitude, this alliance of the
dead and the living. I shall say that this finitude is survivance. Survivance in the
sense of survival that is neither life nor death pure and simple, a sense that is not
thinkable on the basis of the opposition between life and death, a survival that is
not, in spite of the apparent grammar of the formation of the word (ueberleben or
fortleben, living on or to survive, survival), [<that> is not] above life, like something
100
drowned we know is alive. Repetition of reassurance—drowning, then no harm:
Prospero of Miranda, then of Proserpa by Ariel.
She addresses them as the are frozen. Hey come awake with “Their understanding
begins to swell.
sovereign (superanus) can be above everything, a survival that is not more alive, nor
indeed less alive, than life, or more or less dead than death, a sur-vivance that lends
itself to neither comparative nor superlative, a survivance or surviving (but I prefer
the middle voice “survivance” to the active voice of the active infinitive “to survive”
or the substantualizing substantive survival), a survivance whose “sur-” is without
superiority, without height, altitude or highness, and thus without supremacy or
sovereignty. It does not add something extra to life, any more than it cuts something
from it, any more than it cuts anything from inevitable death or attenuates its rigor
and its necessity, what one could call, without yet thinking of the corpse and its
erect rigidity, the rigor mortis, if you will. No, the survivance I am speaking of is
something other than life death, but a groundless ground from which our detached,
identified, and opposed what we thing we can identify under the name of death or
dying (Tod, Sterben), like death properly so-called as opposed to life properly so-
called. It [Ca] begins with survival and that is where there is some other that has me
at its disposal: that is where any self is defenseless. That is what the self is, that is
what I am, what the I is, whether I am there or not. The other, the others, that is the
very thing that survives me, that is called to survive me and that I call the other
inasmuch as it is called, in advance, to survive me, structurally my survivor, not my
101
Ge ties the back of her dress, black zipper in front. Back is like corset.
Behold Prospera—frst shot of her where we can see her entre dress.
Er dres—black and zippers, matches Gonzalo’s, and also S and A’s. They have to stop
at the edge of the ring.
Rack behind
survivor, but the survivor of me, the there beyond my life. (130-31)
Like every trace, a book, the survivance of a book, from its first moment, is a living-
dead machine, sur-viving, the body of a thing buried in a library, in cellars, urns,
drowned in the worldwide waves of the Web, etc., but a dead thing that resuscitates
each time a breath of living reading, each time the breath of the other or the other
breath, each time an intentionality intends it and makes it live again by animating it,
like . . . a body, a spiritual corporeality, a body proper (Lieb and not Koerper), a body
proper animated, activated, traversed, shot through with intentional spirituality.
(131)
This survivance is broached from the moment of the first trace that is supposed to
engender the writing of a book. From the first breath, this archive as survivance is at
work. But once again, this is the case not only with books, or for writing, or for the
archive in the current sense, but for everything from which the tissue of living
experience is woven, through and through. [“tissue” becomes a metaphor for “living
experience,” but “tissue” is not woven, so Derrida deliberately mixes his metaphors
and derails “tissue” skips on to “weave” in place of “tissue”] A weave of survival, like
death in life or life in death, a weave that does not come along to cloth a more
originary existence, a life or a body or a soul that would be supposed to exist naked
102
Wracked upon this shore.
When did you lose your daughter
Drown reference characters make leave out any mention of burning.
In the Dr/ink
under this this clothing. For, on he contrary, they are taken, surprised in advance,
comprehended, they live and die, they live to death as the very inextricability of this
weave. It is against the groundless ground of this quasi-transcendentality of living to
death or of death as sur-vivance that, on the one hand, one can say that “Robinson
Crusoe,” the name of the character and the name of the book, were, according to a
first desire or a last terrified will, according to a will and desire attested to by this
book, by all the Robinson Crusoes in their homonymity or metonymy, [were all]
buried or swallowed alive; but also, on the other hand, . . . one can and one must, one
must be able, in the wake, the inheritance, i.e., in the reanimating and like the
experience reanimated, reawakened in the very reading of this psycho-
anthropology of cultures and civilizations projected by Daniel Defoe and Robinson
Crusoe, one . . . must be able to wonder what is happening today to a culture like
ours, I mean in the present modernity of a Greco-Abrahamic Europe, wonder what is
happening . . . in the procedural organization of survivance, as treatment, by the
family and/or State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. 132
Course called “Living to Death”
in the procedural organization of death as survivance, as treatment, by the family
and / or the State, of the so-called dead body, what we call a corpse. . . . not just in
103
Propsera never writes. In Greenaway film, Gielgud in a bathtub with a toy boat, also
an inkstand containing what seems to be blue water. Water drips can be hear
<iranda I wonder form close up of her to fast folly out, then cut to Prospera tis new
to thee.
Ariel speaks from pool , same as we saw in the early.
the universal structure of survivance . . . but in the funeral itself, in the organized
manner, in the juridical apparatus and the set of technical procedures whereby we . .
. deliver the corpse over to its future, prepare the future of a corpse and prepare
ourselves as one says prepares a corpse. . . . this fantasmatics of dying alive or dying
dead (132)
Unreadable is part of an infrastructure of sur-vivance—also about contingencies
created by media transfers. For us, unreadability is a point of purchase on sur-
vivance.
Sur-vivance is not exactly new. Derrida in “Living On: Borderlines” (reduced to
“Living On” in the second edition of the book in which it was originally published)
and Derrida on death would be difficult to catalogue. Also livance.
First, Derrida makes the title the condition of the archive. In “Title to Be Specified,”
he writes: “the noun titleer would signify two things. In Old French, a titleer (titrier]
—was a monk responsible for the archives of a monastery. He was an archivist, the
archivist par excellence, for if every archivist must prevail over the order of titles—
how can there be an archive without a title [pas d’archive sans titre]—what is to be
said of the guardian of titles?” Second, translation complicates ableit in microscopic
ways, the philological task of determining what is to be glossed and how it is to be
104
Set Caban and his confederates free. Unite the spell.
Then special effects of Ariel made of bees throwing and blowing out bees at C,S and
T, who end up at the cell.
Prospera’s library books are hidden—never ID’d in the film. They are blanks. The
bookcovers are covered by a sheet over them in which they a package that Gonzalo
glossed.
10 Speech argument doesn’t work because people aren’t sure if they are speaking or
hearing speech We never see the ship after the shipwreck even though it is restored
—Ariel says to Prospero.
Spirits as alcohol—bottle—alcohol—drowning your years in booze. Another liquid
oblivion. Putting out the fire the books, so the fire is put out.
Turns into a the narrator of lost opportunity—Caliban narrates the misfire when A
and S stop for the trumpery. It’s too late to get to the books.
It’s like the threat of an archive whose time is up, the moment when the archive becomes a crypt. Prospero’s hour is now at zenith
11 In addition to the skipwreck in Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, there are also
the ships (Antonio’s) that are to have sunk in The Merchant of Venice but then turn
out miraculously to have survived and come to harbor. The Merchant of Venice is yet
another revenge tragedy turned comedy / romance.
12 [in All Quiet on the Western Friend, a soldier says his friend is dead (just killed in combat). That’s not your friend,” the sergeant barks, “that’s a corpse. Move it back there.” And the other soldiers move it away.]
105
gives Prospera. That number does not square with the more numerous book falling
in the eater.
After every third thought shall be my grave, several shot reverse shots of Caliban
and Prospera. She lets him go.
She lets Ariel, then sequence as he sings where the bee sucks there suck I all in
water with kaleidoscopic patters,
Vut to her
13 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare
(New York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A
Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991)
serves as a paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the
sources of each the twenty-seven books shown in the films and giving their titles
once again as they are drowned (see p. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray
edition includes a comic booklet version of the film.
14 Julie Taymor, The Tempest, Adapted From the Play by William Shakespeare (New
York: Abrams, 2010). Peter Greenaway’s tie-in book, Prospero's Books: A Film of the
Shakespeare's The Tempest (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991) serves as a
paratextual commentary on the film, providing information about the sources of
each the twenty-seven books shown in the film and giving their titles once again as
they are drowned (see pp. 161-62). The Secret of Kells blu-ray edition includes a
comic booklet version of the film.
106
Characters in the play refer to “drowning” make no reference to the ship burning.
Only Ariel, when he describes the shipwreck to Prospero.
The play is about “unwrecking” (the ship is rebuilt; no one harmed; clothes not wet.
Julie Taymor’s The Tempest; opening title over a sand castle—begins to melt in the
rain, Miranda is holding it; cross-cutting between ship and Miranda running;
The bed catches fire; ten cuts to Prospera, then Miranda running to her, ship
burning in the distance; as inside of ship catches fire
Shot of Prospera in the menu is shot when she turns the clouds back after the storm
and after the ship as sunk.
No flashback of knowing how I loved my books, furnished with me”
Ariel merges form watery reflection and makes a splash, literally, as his entrance.
Flashback after he merges to the shipwreck—ship on fire, Ariel surrounded by fire
too. Citing lines about sulpherous ship—so there is textual motivation for showing
it burning.
Boat burning versus book burning.
Ariel quotes Fredidand mockingly “o devils here” (sounds like Caliban)
But are they safe?
Not a hair perished.
Look. The ship is hid So we see the ship in harbor completely restored.
Ariel is transparent, moves around with a sound effect in a kind of fastforward
tracing.
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Flashback of Ariel being trapped in the pine; cut back to prospera with background
of forest slashing down the screen as the new background comes into view-a
variation of the wipe, or inversion of it.
“invisible to every eyeball else”
Prospera on Caliban. We cannot miss him. He does make our fire. Fetches in our
wood.
Caliban gets no flashbacks when he tells the story of showing Prospera the island.
Miranda gets the abhorr’d slave . . . I taught thee language” lines
Prospera so slave hence—the actor was in Amistad, playing a slave; also in
Gladiator.
Ariel sings full fathom five under water, superimposed on shot of Ferdiand hearing
ad looking around to find who is singing, in a series of shots,
“Where should this music be?
Follow it or rather it has dawn me L, it begins again. Falsetto—a bit like Greenaway.
Full fathom, under water, but also in a forest (through which Forest is walking—
close ups of both Ariel and Ferdinand
The ballad does remember my drowned father.
The film’s diegesis separates “realism” from “magical” special effects, and also
combines them, overlaps, in some sequences, differentiating the spirit Airiel) from
the “real” human characters.
Myself am Naples, ever since my father.
Ariel appears only in shots with Prospera—not in shots of Ferdinand and Miranda.
“I charge thee that thou attend me.”
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(Prospera telling Miranda the tale—would cure deafness—does’t thou mark?”—
Prospera thinking her call doesn’t trough? That she has to keep replacing it,
redialing? As if Miranda were not there, as she couldn’t tell by looking to see if
Miranda is listening or not?
Ariel’s pine-trees and paper? Pre ealy modern, I guess. Rags, not wood pulp as
source of paper.
Cut to fire in Propsera’s cave—“so lie there my art”
Propsera didn’t harm a hair of any crew member, she tells Miranda.
Lots of chemical bottles full of liquids in her cave, out of focus in and in soft focus or
in focus with racking focus.
Flashback montage cross cut with Miranda’s speech—and to Prospera. Flashbacks
in bluish hue.
Shot of Gonzalo given her a “package,” a sheet covering something square (the
books?) here is also a chest in her boat.
Boatswain is black
Music sounds a like Nymanish
Foul water shalt thy drink
The DVD menu is worth discussing (will match Anonymess discussion).
It begins and ends with Prospero and is all shown as if underwater.
There are two hsots of books "drowning." There is also shot of the
ship burning in the distance.
The ship also burns as it is wrecked by Ariel, and there's a shot of
it fully restored in a harbor.
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The film is good for us in that it highlights the play’s not so
obvious opposition between burning and drowning.
The fantasy you identified is operative all over the play, I am
realizing. Like Miranda freaking out when the ship goes down and
Prospero reassuring her; but then Ariel has to reassure Prospero, who
contradicts her own reassurance of Miranda and is similarly
reassured--almost the same words--not a hair on their heads harmed.
Ariel just gives a more detailed account of what happened to the
survivors. Ariel also talks about the ship burning (in the play)--I
had forgotten that.
Interesting too what gets a flashback and what does not--there's no
flashback for Prospera getting few books with Gonzalo's help or of her
library WE see no books in a flashback of Prospera and Miranda (baby)
on the boat in which they are set adrift.
Drowning by Numbers
Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s
Books. Cataloguing and displaying twenty-four books (twenty-five if we include The
Tempest; in any case, the total falls far short of the thirty five plays published in the
the First Folio) of Prospero’s library in separate sequences, the film has an epilogue
but no closing sequence beyond that. In the final shot, ‘The End’ appears at the
bottom of the screen and remains there with additional logo information as the shot
fades to black. The opening title sequence consists of one of Greenaway’s
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characteristic tracking shots, the camera moving at a steady pace as it tracks right in
one long take. The sequence unfolds much like a scroll; a huge book being turned by
a naked man in the opening title sequence is just one of many bizarre and
heterogeneous scenes. By contrast, the interpolated serial book sequences that
interrupt the dialogue from The Tempest are all set up and set off with the use of a
digital paint box. Greenaway visualizes the (extra-textual and sometimes
theatrically staged) book drowning in the film's final tour de force montage which
ends with the two final book sequences. Prospero’s last books prove to be
exceptions: Shakespeare’s yet to be completed First Folio and The Tempest. All of
the plays have been printed in the Folio, the narrator tell us, except for The Tempest,
which is written in a bound book the same size as the Folio. The first page we saw
Prospero writing on in the film’s prologue returns first as a blank space in what is a
facsimile of the Folio and then as a film prop, a bound, completed manuscript of The
Tempest we saw Prospero begin to write in the prologue.
The permanently blank pages of the Folio become an empty yet potentially
redemptive allegorical space. ‘There are thirty five plays in the book and room for one
more,’ the narrator says; ‘nineteen pages have been left for its inclusion right at the front
of the book, just after the preface’ as the camera shows the First Folio page with the
poem entitled “To the Reader.” (Figures X.1-X.4.)
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Figure 1 Figure 2
Figure 3 Figure 4
As Caliban surfaces from the water and recovers the floating books, the narrator
offers the ostensibly reassuring comment that ‘We still have these two books, safely
fished from the sea.’
Of course copies of these two books are extant, but the two books in the film exist
only as props, as referent effects. Shakespeare’s safely fished books both expand
and diminish Shakespeare’s authorial presence: on the one hand, the collected
works are completed; on the other, their completion means splitting the manuscript
of The Tempest from the printed thirty four plays (and implicitly superimposing
Prospero on Shakespeare as author of The Tempest). In any case, the drowning of
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Prospero’s books but not Shakespeare’s is only part of Greenaway’s rewriting of the
play. Prospero ends by liberating Ariel and delivering the epilogue, his close-up
talking-head shot increasingly shrinking into a smaller frame until it occupies only
its centre and is surrounded by black. In an extratextual epilogue, Prospero’s image
then becomes a photograph of Gielgud on a stage set, and as the camera dollies back
15
These lines are sung by Feste, one of the more complex comic foils to appear in a Shakespearean work. He is something of a jester, of course, but he has an unmistakably philosophical underside (“Better a witty fool than a foolish wit”), pressing characters to abandon their self-pity, to recognize that life always brings its burdens — but pressing them also to seize the moment of love, which brings life’s rewards. All of this is very much the message of this sweet, simple, and yet poignant song, which attained celebrity in its own right in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Part of that celebrity was owed not to Shakespeare, however, but to the man who composed the music by which the words came to be known.
Listen to the setting of “O Mistress Mine,” one of the last works composed by Thomas Morley, a student of William Byrd’s who died shortly after the play opened, in the fall of 1602. Although he was an organist at St Paul’s Cathedral and he attempted to write some serious church music, Morley is best known for his perfection of the consort style (the introduction of the “broken consort,” in which wind
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at a smooth pace in what Greenaway calls “a single, bravura take” (163), we see
Ariel (played by three different actors) running towards the camera as a text begins
to be superimposed over the applauding audience of courtiers. This last shot of the
film ends as Ariel is shot in slow motion and then jumps off the screen and over the
camera.16
instruments are added to the conventional strings) and of the English madrigal.
It’s likely that Morley knew and worked with Shakespeare — they lived close to one another in central London and worshiped in the same parish church — and it’s possible that some of his Shakespearean songs were actually commissioned by the Bard, though this has never been firmly established. What’s certain, however, is that Morley was a great admirer of Shakespeare’s writings.
Morley’s works are known for their light style and their conscious importation of folk melodies (such as his amazing setting of “Under the Green Linden” in the The First Booke of Consort Lessons (1597)). They are less ponderous and downbeat than works by such contemporaries as William Byrd and John Dowland, and so are well suited to Shakespearean comic romances. First, listen to a non-vocal broken-consort rendition of “O Mistress Mine” by Stockholms Barockensemble, then to a traditional theatrical performance by Ensemble Chaconne, with Pamela Dellal as soloist. A superior performance by the great Alfred Deller can be found here. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/09/hbc-
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In a moment of what Latour and Wiebel term ‘iconoclash’, or uncertainty about
whether this liberation from the page is creative or destructive, the manuscripts of
The Tempest and First Folio are saved only insofar as the collected works are split
into different print media (handwriting and print).17 This differs markedly from the
more symmetrical ending in the screenplay.18 In Greenaway’s unscripted epilogue,
the book returns as an unreadable work of art: a single, unbound page looking like
an abstract multi-media painting (fig X.3). The film sequences with ‘Prospero /
Shakespeare’s’ (164) books had already begun to make them partially unreadable.
The Folio is submerged even before it is drowned so that the date cannot be read on
the bottom of the page. Similarly, the shot of the page with Ben Jonson’s dedicatory
poem in the first Folio omits ‘To the memory of my beloved’ at the top of the page,
showing just ‘The Author MR. W I L L I A M S H A K E S P E A R E: A N D what he hath
left us.’ The Tempest is similarly defaced: the manuscript is shot in such extreme
close up that the film frame cuts off the top and bottom parts of the page (fig X.3).
Writing becomes automatic. A close up of the word ‘boatswain’ we saw Prospero
write in the prologue returns in the First Folio sequence, along with Gielgud’s voice
pronouncing it (and ‘master’) off screen. But this time an question mark is added
after ‘boatswain’ not by the hand of a visible writer which we by now know well, but
rather through the apparently agent-less processes of animation (figs X.1-2).
90008212
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Figure 5 Figure 6
Figure 7 Figure 8
Similarly, in the final shot, unreadable letters are written backwards in the upper
right of the screen through animation and run right to left, some letters disappear as
others appear in a recursive cycle (fig X.3). ‘The End’, the date of Prospero’s Books,
and the film’s production companies appear first on bottom of the final page but
then only on the otherwise black screen (fig X.4). Genette’s account of the
publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the author’s name on the book cover
and title page) is transformed by Greenaway into an ‘exit’ that involves reading
one’s way out of his film.19
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Unauthoring The Tempest
From issue of authorship as raised particularly in Greenaway but also in paratextless drowning books of Taymor, move to authorship and autobiography debate over the The Tempest. Bacon wrote it. Oxford did not. Shakespeare’s autobiography.
Scene in The Amateur with Christopher Plummer, a secret agent, giving a lecture about Bacon being the author of Shakespeare using Prospero’s epilogue, projected on a screen, as his evidence, before a small crowed and the hero, also interested n the Shakespeare authorship debate, escapes from the lecture hall from a would-be assassin. Prospero’s Books as a film adaptation outside the play—leaving the play text blank, a future state of being a book to come, a book that never arrives.The text is written and erased.Water both a medium of writing and of erasure of writing.
Going on Record: PanoptichronPanchronicon—Phoebe demonstrates that one can record one’s voice by citing passage about Bacon being the true author of Shakespeare’s works and is told the cylinder to the phonograph will “talk back.”
The facsimile and prop are like hidden text, the invisible that is incarnated, in the
physical material of the book, but still yet to be read, terra incognita that can
never be recognized except as dirt or ureadable ink. Yet textual critics are no
less empirical than are editors. If there is no lost manuscript to recover, as many
textual critics maintain, just a desire for it, the lost manuscript, if recovered would
be an always already edited manuscript. As McLeod puts it, it would have layers.
The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a
palimpsest. Editors think they linearize the process like CSI. Textual critics think
there is only an infinite regress. One could go back to the mystic writing pad and
celluloid. The unconscious would take one back to arche-writing. Question
concerning technology in textual criticism, editing, and the history of the book.20
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To Derrida, biblion and subjectile and facsimile in the text itself—a kind of back
up visible of the back up, but as a ghost matter, at one remove or more, a kind of
immediacy. A kind of anrchivology n the archival effect not recognized as such.
Facsimile poses a problem of narration—materiality and referent—and
historicism.21
And the appeal rather than command or decision at the end takes us to WB’s Trauerspiel (see Sam Weber on Hamlet) with Prospero now a slave, a prisoner, but also returns us to the letter, difference between singular and plural. Christopher Plummer and Jon Savage action film The Amateur (dir. Charles Jarrot, 1982) in which Plummer is a CIA agent who also reads the epilogue as a cryptogram of Bacon’s signature that he wrote the play and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Savage plays Charles Heller, a cryptographer in the employ of the CIAThe missing author (Shakespeare, Prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing, integrationist move on the complete works.Book or books? Magic book?
The future anterior of Prospero’s epilogue, as you would me set me free.Request and a command.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,And what strength I have's mine own,Which is most faint. Now, ’tis trueI must be here confined by youOr sent to Naples. Let me not, (5)Since I have my dukedom got,And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell;But release me from my bands
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With the help of your good hands:(10)Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,(15)Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.The epilogue installs a future anterior of who will have written “Shakespeare’s” plays. The referent of “me” is no longer Shakespeare. See Looney on The Tempest as NOT autobiographical. And all of the Stratfordians who read it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. The pay-off of imagining a reading yet to come is double: you get to sign for the writer while reading his signature and you get to be mute while doing it. You are merely a kind of medium without a medium. Desire for muteness, See Barbara Johnson. All you have to do is breathe: “Gentle breath” Also compare applause being asked for by Prospero to Agamben’s Power and the Glory and lauding / applauding the sovereign. His last chapter on media.
Also seems like the doubling of authorship allows for the possibility of forgery, that someone else wrote it and forged a signature. There is no paper work in the play, no contract, nothing to sign. Just recognition. So the play becomes a cover, a cover story, an alibi, just sleep –think but this and all is mended, that you have slept
Homeland episode 2, Claire Danes as comparative philogist using split screen and them boxes around hands in each to show pattern. Crtptologist does not see it, however.But her boss does. Her idea ocmes form watching a jaz group play and watching he ifingering on nstruments.
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NOTES
A reading of Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books, drowning the books is like throwing
them into acid; Caliban rescues the Folio does not have the open book, a re-opened
book. The end after the interruption of the masque and before the end, which is
really a long epilogue before the epilogue. Anti-climatic last Act.
(Derrida on the signature in Van Gogh—link up to signature in Tempest in Peter
Greenaway Prospero’s Books and the film with Christopher Plummer about Anagram
of Prospero in the epilogue in The Amateur (also has more Shakespeare near the
beginning; compare to Three Days of the Condor—“reader”).
Heading for Taymor film
Prospera’s Books
Greenaway puts in what's not there,
but then leaves the Folio missing The Tempest, which is then contained
in a separate volume as a manuscript. So there is interesting
oscillation between library and book as storage unit / collection in
which the book takes spectral form (the book or books never appear/s
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on stage) as it supplements (and doesn't). I'm using a book by
Georges Didi-Huberman entitled La resemblance par contact to talk about
the book / books as a contact zone that makes mimesis possible as chain of iterable
and endless substitutions (a writing of writing, a doubling, mirroring in repetition);
the
failure to transfer the text from one medium to another (in Benjamin's
the failure to translate, language itself being a medium) because it
would appear, there is no medium specificity to the book).
Precisely because of the twofold moment of writing and affixing in a collection
(archiving)
Arche-writing versus the archive. Doesn’t relate them.
So in P’s Books, its is the spectralization of the book, its going missing , its storing
being singular and plural that allows for and disables a totalized, closed recollection,
and final interiorization. Instead, the end is a gesture, hands clapping, as a liberation.
Mowat says what is to be expected—but that makes the missing text all the more
remarkable.
Also, the closing of the book allows for closure, again spectral—an epilogue, which
opens itself to a hermeneutics of suspicion. Who wrote the books? Tiles and
authors are missing. No paratext, no index. So the epilogue can be read as
Shakespeare’s farewell, autobiographically, or coding as his confession that Bacon
wrote the play.
P Books the "s" goes missing in the play; G goes with the plural.
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Because it marks "We split we split moment in the play as storage until
(library as shipwreck ), the Shakespeare corpus has something missing
it, a tear in the mss, something missing incomplete, that has to be
veiled, covered off, even by shocking amounts of nudity. Play seems to
lay the body bare, even Prospero's. But it multiplies / ages Ariels
as shelf-helpers.
closed and open books, scenes of unreading, reading by heart, of textual incarnation,
attachments, casings, and textuality versus signature:
The missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the
stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or
Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force
reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing,
integrationist move on the complete works.
Book or books? Magic book?
Set up con-spirational—spirit in conspiracy theory—as in the comic book version as
well as Rembrandt J’accuse
Framing, like framing in Prospero’s Books (also a book of the film).
Becomes a question of missing author who frames and gets framed.
Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books
Singular versus plural, books get voice-overs. We don’t get them in Prospero’s Books
book. In the film, The Tempest is blank, Folio edition is the 24th book, not destroyed
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but found by Caliban. Greenaway has a notion of seriality involving closing and
opening the book.
The boatswain scene (1.1.) is really interesting--all about drowning--and of course,
no one drowns and the ship has been rebuilt, according to the boatswain at the end
of the play. I also found a bunch of stuff I had forgot about we could use to make the
transition form The Tempest to Anonymess regarding Prospero as Shakespeare (in
a spy film film called The Amateur--only Prospero is Bacon).
Drowning in relation to friends and enemies—face book / Folio—the reader as
friend?
I now turn to Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films in order to examine specific
ways in which the endings and end title sequences adapt the book in ways that
both unify the film and yet also complicate our sense of the ending of film, of how
the complete a narrative film is, of when the narrative stops and the closing
paratext begins, of when one can exit the cinema or turn off the DVD or blu-ray.
Can one still afford to write off the end of film when the end credits begin? Or is
one compelled for fearing of missing something to stay seated and keep
watching even after “The End,” potentially reentering the film from the moments
in the textual / paratextual endings after “The End” that loop back the closing
paratext to the earlier text of the film? I address these questions and others in a
necessarily tentative manner by discussing the extent to which the endings and
end title sequences of Taymor, Greenaway, and Moore’s films paradoxically save
the film author as a writer in the fullest sense by destroying or distintegrating the
book (“auteur,” you will recall, means “author” in French and has a much higher
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cultural status than does the everyday “ecrivain,” or writer).
Prospero’s books do not exist in The Tempest. There are references to his
staff and to his cloak as prop, but not to what is sometimes his “book” or to his
“books.” We never see Prospero drown his books.22
Greenaway performs a very different kind of salvage operation in Prospero’s
Books.
22 See Barbara Mowat, “Prospero’s Book,” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.1 (2001), 1-
33. The Tempest refers, Mowat notes, both to a singular book (“I'll to my book”;
“I'll drown my book”) and to plural books (“books I priz'd above my dukedom”;
“burn but his books”). Mowat insists that Prospero’s book is present even though
there is no stage direction for it in the text: “Prospero's always-offstage book” is
the “one book essential to his magic, the one that he goes offstage to consult
before the series of spirit spectacles begins in Act 3, the same one that near the
end of the play he promises to drown as he abjures his magic.” Prospero’s
strangely singular and clearly spectral singular plural book/s “appear” only as
phantom referents in the printed script of the play. It makes no sense at all to
make a prop for the actor playing Prospero to consult off-stage (Prospero and the
actor playing him are somewhat psychotically conflated through a psychologistic
reading of the play as literature and performance equated). What are we to
make of a phantom prop that is referenced both in the singular and the plural
without ever be shown on stage? What is the relation between the book/s and
the spirits Prospero commands? Greenaway and Taymor address these
questions in very different ways by materializing what is missing.
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Genette’s account of the publisher’s introduction (consisting chiefly of the
author’s name on the book cover and title page) is transformed by Greenaway in.
Ci-Phi The Reading to Come: Yes, We Can’(t)
Internal reading a matter of awaiting—messianic reading. Mowat too—we have to
wait for the more knowledge to come, but writing, Godot like,is what it’s all about.
''Tis for good and useful writings to nail and rivet it to them, and
its reputation will go _according to the fortune of our state. For
which reason, I am not afraid to insert herein several private
articles, which will spend their use amongst the men now living_, AND
THAT CONCERN THE PARTICULAR KNOWLEDGE OF SOME WHO WILL SEE
FURTHER
INTO THEM THAN THE COMMON READER.' But that the inner reading of these
private articles--that reading which lay farther in--to which he
invites the attention of those whom it concerns--was not expected to
spend its use among the men then living, that which follows might seem
19
Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.
Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the
book.
And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.
Ranciere, Names of History Philip II writing desk—death of the king
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to imply. It was that wrapping of them, it was that gross
superscription which 'the fortune of our state was likely to make
obsolete ere long,' this author thought, as we shall see if we look
into his prophecies a little. 'I will not, after all, as I often hear
dead men spoken of, that men should say of _me_: "He _judged_, and
Prospero never writes in the lay, nor does he ever read.
Derrida Post Card—Love of Lcan why only what he would have said? Why not
would he wold have written? Why does Derrida reverse Lacan, who Derrida says
went from speech to writng without acknowledging Derrida, by going from writing
to speech? What s=is the differencebetweenthe future anterior of what will or
would have been said after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan” and the Pascal
note?
20 The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be
wrong. Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited
already? Textual criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as
deliverance form its mistakes, but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic,
mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly by.
21 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely
contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there
exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao
is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,
that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be
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LIVED SO and SO. Could he have spoken when he was dying, he would have
said _so_ or _so_. I knew him better than any."
Mackaye, Harold Steele. The Panchronicon. New York: Charles Scribner’s
Sons, 1904.
Image of “ci-phi” (not cyber fiction but cipher fiction) as image of the not yet read,
the temporality of reading that leaves it open, the archive open, never closed,
finished. Strong historicism , focused on the past, necessarily crosses over into
able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)
direction of narrative. (152)
As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those
of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a
remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider
the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies
behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.
(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where
the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not
its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.
Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an
always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved
editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and
production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of
textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see
something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.
(Understand comprehends letters and images).
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future, fictional speculation, however. Or gesture of deferral to the future (more
knowledge of a positivist sort) is a way of not having to read, of suspending reading
(we can't know anything yet, but someday soon, we will! But that day never arrives,
of course). So a very perverse structure of empiricist research—you want not to
know enough, just a little will do, preferably with images.
The Reader Conceal-Revealed: The Not Yet Read lost manuscripts of Shakespeare
It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have
occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by
deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate
damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left
no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156
Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156
“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)
p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.
(124)
Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary
of theology “restored” text.
Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.
“death bed manuscript” (84)
“The Easter Wings gallery”
A museum tour.
Greek technopaegnia (142)
Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like
a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie
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Look at examples of The Not Yet Read lost manuscript fantasy, including Black
Dossier but focus on the Bacon as Shakespeare controversy. Sir Francis Bacon’s
Cipher Story and Panchronicon as example of uncanny relation of truth and fiction.
Loop in which the revelation of the hidden leads to a pointing to other places of
hiddenness, just waiting to be revealed. Science oriented to fiction, and fiction
oriented to science.
because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the
underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into
being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,
because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is
abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently
superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.
“Shape” as a form (printing)
A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting
inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s
approach to a science (148)
One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s
poetic Enter Reader, 41
Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.
Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to
Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or
merely befuddled degeneration? (14)
Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited
texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)
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Images of cipher machines and portraits of authors. Cipher story cover with page
from the Folio and the Droeshout portrait superimposed on it without the face (the
folio text constitutes the lines of his face. Shakespeare Code cover. Like Lost
Leonardo—Da Vinci Code is the original for The Shakespeare Code. On a vole la
McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not
produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.
At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?
Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.
And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to
birth (but no after birth.
Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no
reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual
eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it
is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the
author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not
text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.
What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.
So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.16 On this point, see Judith Buchanan, Shakespeare on Film (Harlow: Longman-
Pearson, 2005), especially pp. 229-230.
17 Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science,
Religion and Art (2002). Latour and Wiebel write: ‘Iconoclasm is when we know
what is happening in the act of breaking and what the motivations are for what
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Jaconda, with Romeo as thief. Cobbe Portrait—use of scientific machines to
establish the truth.
Doctor Who Season3?
Episode going back to Shakespeare’s London
To discover why Love’s Labours Regained Or Love Regained. She shouts “author
author” birthof the author is a retrofit. Do they say that? Now they do. not written—
it’s about race reations in the pre
Materiality of the book—not a stage prop.
Spectrality of sovereignty. But question of biopower and also destruction of the
book.
And question of burial at sea versus cremation and inhumation.
Ranciere, Names of History Philip II writing desk—death of the king
appears as a clear project of destruction of art; iconoclash, on the other hand, is
when one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there
is no way to know, without further inquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’
(14).
18 In the screenplay, the film’s ending loops back to the beginning: ‘A series of ever
decreasing splashes drip and plop into the black water . . . thus the beginning of the
film is reprised. A final splash plops . . . all water-movement ceases and the screen is
a black velvet void.’ (Prospero's Books: A Film of the Shakespeare's The Tempest,
164).
131
Prospero never writes in the lay, nor does he ever read.
Derrida Post Card—Love of Lcan why only what he would have said? Why not
would he wold have written? Why does Derrida reverse Lacan, who Derrida says
went from speech to writng without acknowledging Derrida, by going from writing
to speech? What s=is the differencebetweenthe future anterior of what will or
would have been said after Lacan’s death in “For the Love of Lacan” and the Pascal
note?
Scene in The Amateur with Christopher Plummer, a secret agent, giving a lecture about Bacon being the author of Shakespeare using Prospero’s epilogue, projected on a screen, as his evidence, before a small crowed and the hero, also interested n the Shakespeare authorship debate, escapes from the lecture hall from a would-be assassin. Prospero’s Books as a film adaptation outside the play—leaving the play text blank, a future state of being a book to come, a book that never arrives.The text is written and erased.Water both a medium of writing and of erasure of writing.
Going on Record: PanoptichronPanchronicon—Phoebe demonstrates that one can record one’s voice by citing passage about Bacon being the true author of Shakespeare’s works and is told the cylinder to the phonograph will “talk back.”
The facsimile and prop are like hidden text, the invisible that is incarnated, in the
physical material of the book, but still yet to be read, terra incognita that can
never be recognized except as dirt or ureadable ink. Yet textual critics are no
less empirical than are editors. If there is no lost manuscript to recover, as many
textual critics maintain, just a desire for it, the lost manuscript, if recovered would
be an always already edited manuscript. As McLeod puts it, it would have layers.
The origin is a palimpsest and the untextual book as material thing becomes a
palimpsest. Editors think they linearize the process like CSI. Textual critics think
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there is only an infinite regress. One could go back to the mystic writing pad and
celluloid. The unconscious would take one back to arche-writing. Question
concerning technology in textual criticism, editing, and the history of the book.23
To Derrida, biblion and subjectile and facsimile in the text itself—a kind of back
up visible of the back up, but as a ghost matter, at one remove or more, a kind of
immediacy. A kind of anrchivology n the archival effect not recognized as such.
Facsimile poses a problem of narration—materiality and referent—and
historicism.24
And the appeal rather than command or decision at the end takes us to WB’s Trauerspiel (see Sam Weber on Hamlet) with Prospero now a slave, a prisoner, but also returns us to the letter, difference between singular and plural. Christopher Plummer and Jon Savage action film The Amateur (dir. Charles Jarrot, 1982) in which Plummer is a CIA agent who also reads the epilogue as a cryptogram of Bacon’s signature that he wrote the play and, by extension, all of Shakespeare’s plays. John Savage plays Charles Heller ,a cryptographer in the employ of the CIAThe missing author (Shakespeare, prospero as Shakespeare in his farewell to the stage play—the drowning of the book and breaking of the staff his farewell, or Bacon as Shakespeare) keeps getting reinscribed at the vanishing point of force reading (Malvolio) between law and justice, each making the same totalizing, integrationist move on the complete works.Book or books? Magic book?
23 The edited world is not going to disappear just because it is revealed to be
wrong. Indeed, which of our abiding wrlds is no innocent as not to be edited
already? Textual criticism is important to imp on editorial practice . . not as
deliverance form its mistakes, but because it an vivid shapes to the problematic,
mythy errors that we shall contiue to fly by.
133
The future anterior of Prospero’s epilogue, as you would me set me free.Request and a command.
Now my charms are all o'erthrown,And what strength I have's mine own,Which is most faint. Now, ’tis trueI must be here confined by youOr sent to Naples. Let me not, (5)Since I have my dukedom got,24 “emboss the paper with the unlinked type . . . renaissance books routinely
contain hidden text where the innocent eye draws a blank. In other words, there
exists a literature not yet registered on the maps of early printing. The Corteginao
is just one of many books with such terra incognita—terrain unknown until now,
that is. (190) uninked type” (189) But even in merely ambient light you would be
able to see several lines of dirty traces below it.” “The angelic (the missionary)
direction of narrative. (152)
As we are learning to differentiate the stages of the printing schedule from those
of the literary narrative” (159). Overleaf is another copy of the same page—a
remarkable one, for the paper remembers its ordeal at the press. (159)Consider
the photograph, opposite (168). With this image, I want to remind you of what lies
behind the term ‘forme’, meaning on one side of a printed sheet of paper.
(169)Bleed through of the diagrams in McLeod’s essay. Book splits right where
the two hands hold the text partly open to see a shape of Easter Wings that is not
its shape and to read The Church across the title as well as Easter Wings.
Textual critics and editors are irreducibly conflicted in some sense, but only to an
always already redited to default. Or some dialectic—Hegelian—improved
editions. Fewer errors. Both produce genetic narratives—transmission and
134
And pardoned the deceiver, dwellIn this bare island by your spell;But release me from my bandsWith the help of your good hands:(10)Gentle breath of yours my sailsMust fill, or else my project fails,Which was to please. Now I wantSpirits to enforce, art to enchant,And my ending is despair,(15)
production, both invested in the same “thing” and both adopt the same model of
textual forensics. McLeod’s investment isn’t in gazing but reading is see
something (metaphorically) I didn’t see that I see your point.
(Understand comprehends letters and images).
It is always possible that the change from a comma to a period could have
occurred through damage to the comma during the print-run, rather than by
deliberate substitution of one type for the other. But that such discriminate
damage would have not only enhanced the system of punctuation, but also left
no destructive traces is highly improbable. N.20, 156
Photo-facsimiles of the entire manuscripts are . . “ n. 23,156
“textual tree” 124 (botanist, naturalist)
p. 124—return to the same place the reader was at the beginning of the essay.
(124)
Textual critics and editors both act like prosecutors, call up experts. Vocabulary
of theology “restored” text.
Serial order of the editions numbered. Like Prospero’s Books.
“death bed manuscript” (84)
“The Easter Wings gallery”
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Unless I be relieved by prayer,Which pierces so, that it assaultsMercy itself, and frees all faults.As you from crimes would pardoned be,Let your indulgence set me free.The epilogue installs a future anterior of who will have written “Shakespeare’s” plays. The referent of “me” is no longer Shakespeare. See Looney on The Tempest as NOT autobiographical. And all of the Stratfordians who read it as Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage. The pay-off of imagining a reading yet to come is double: you get to sign for the writer while reading his signature and you get to be mute while doing it. You are merely a kind of medium without a medium. Desire for muteness,
A museum tour.
Greek technopaegnia (142)
Photography does not lie, of course. You can trust it, because it just gazes, like
a silly goose (the two words are cognate).27 It does not lie. It does not lie
because it does not analyze. It surfaces while, instantaneously. But the
underlying type-facsimile is not facsimile is not a gestalt [sic]; its coming into
being was atomistic, sequential and linear. It is all these because it is a reading,
because reading rationalizes (these two words also cognate), because reading is
abstract and analytical. In short, reading is to deep – it is not sufficiently
superficial to report the evidence, which lies, after all, on the surface.
“Shape” as a form (printing)
A stroll through the Easter Wings Gallery shows appropriation drifting
inappropriately according to fashion; this drift forestalls literary criticism’s
approach to a science (148)
One wonders if there is not something non-linear—even anti-linear—Herbert’s
poetic Enter Reader, 41
Czech cop and CIA agents in Jon Savage movie The Amateur.
136
See Barbara Johnson. All you have to do is breathe: “Gentle breath” Also compare applause being asked for by Prospero to Agamben’s Power and the Glory and lauding / applauding the sovereign. His last chapter on media.
Also seems like the doubling of authorship allows for the possibility of forgery, that someone else wrote it and forged a signature. There is no paper work in the play, no contract, nothing to sign. Just recognition. So the play becomes a cover, a cover story, an alibi, just sleep –think but this and all is mended, that you have slept
Homeland episode 2, Claire Danes as comparative philogist using split screen and them boxes around hands in each to show pattern. Crtptologist does not see it,
Well, if mutation of messages is the way of this world, how are to react to
Herbert’s editors? Does their inexhaustible fertility issue in sublime adaptation or
merely befuddled degeneration? (14)
Is it really an exaggeration to say that these poems are invisible in the edited
texts of the last century and a half before form (reading)
McLeod wants to separate narratives even though in a sense he does not
produce a narrative, or only a narrative loop. End in the begin.
At the same time a delinearization-one or two poems? 3D perspective or not?
Constant derailings made possible through the photograph and the diagram.
And yet a narrative of production—from fetus or fetal production / gestation to
birth (but no after birth.
Not so much into breaking things and walking away but into shape (no
reshaping). You want to stay with the shape. Not geneticist, not a textual
eugenics. A secular Creationism (hidden text gets revealed as literature—but it
is not readable-“uninked type.” Found lost text that is not word of God (or the
author). It’s a surplus, not a supplement, but it lacks meaning. It’s an image, not
text. The reistance you provide editors lies in the way you refuse to read images.
What about the stake in the posthumous? Keats and Herbert.
137
however.But her boss does. Her idea ocmes form watching a jaz group play and watching he ifingering on nstruments.
Not a book or not a book. Crux is about the fauxsimile. Mowat has attended to it in a curious way—she does and does not establish the Grimgoire as the referent. And she says the book exists, even if only off-stage.But there is a an additional, more enigmatic crux to which she does not attend and
which is not generally recognized as one, namely, the distinction between burning
his books and drown my books.
Lanier, Douglas.Title "Drowning the Book: Prospero's Books and the Textual Shakespeare."Venue/Publisher Bulman, Shakespeare, Theory, and Performance [F]: 187-209.Head Entry ao230Date 1996Notes/Performers [Warns against reading videos (such as PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.]) as text, arguing that suchreadings "risk an elision of the very historical and materialcontingencies which the return to performance has sought to recover."Reprinted in Shaughnessy, editor, Shakespeare on Film (q.v.).]Stalpaert, Christel,Role editor.Title Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books: Critical Essays.Series Statement (Studies in Performing Arts and Film 3.)Venue/Publisher Ghent: Academia Press, 2000. 223 pp.Date 2000Notes/Performers [Includes seven essays of Shakespeare interest.]Tribble, Evelyn.Title "Listening to Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Shakespeare Survey 61 (2008): 161-69.Date 2008Notes/Performers [Argues that the "acoustic dimension of Prospero'sBooks [q.v.] is one of the most complex areas of intersection between"Tempest and Peter Greenaway's film.]McMullan, Gordon.Title Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing: Authorship in theProximity of Death.Venue/Publisher Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,2007. xii + 402 pp.Date 2007Notes/Performers [In addressing the "relationship of creativity to old
So your kind of like Saint Peter but as a mortician.
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age and death," explores "the development of the idea of 'lateShakespeare' from the later eighteenth century to the present, showingthe mismatch between . . . the 'discourse of lateness' and the actualconditions of production and of authorship in the early moderntheatre." In the course of the discussion, examines King Lear as alate play and the performance of late selfhood in Prospero by JohnGielgud (in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [q.v.], Mark Rylance(in Tim Carroll's production [q.v.]), and John Bell as Prospero (inPeter Evans' production [q.v.]).] Voigts-Virchow, Eckart.Title "'Something richer, stranger, more self-indulgent': PeterGreenaway's Fantastic See-Changes in Prospero's Books et al."Venue/Publisher Anglistik und Englischunterricht 59 (1996): 83-99.Date 1996Notes/Performers [Studies the postmodern fantastic in PeterGreenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.) in relation to "the phenomena ofabstraction, self-reflection, and excess."]
Trimm, Ryan.Title "Moving Pictures, Still Lives: Staging National Tableaux andText in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Cinema Journal 46, no. 3 (2007): 26-53.Date 2007Notes/Performers [Argues that Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books"works against the heritage film's generic obsession with setting byforegrounding its soundstage as a textual and performative space" andthus is not situated in a specific time or even reality. Englishsummary, 26.]
Nethersole, Reingard.Title "'Burn but his books': The Power of the Library in 16th CenturyEngland and France with Reference to South Africa Today."Venue/Publisher Shakespeare in Southern Africa 8 (1995): 53-63.Date 1995Notes/Performers [Argues that in Tempest, Prospero's library is ametaphor for the power of knowledge. Books become centers of powerbecause they create "products of book learning," that is, people suchas Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand who will rule cities or nations.Also published under the same title in Shakespeare across Cultures[F]: 185-203.]
McKee, Alexander.Title "Jonson vs. Jones in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Literature/Film Quarterly 35, no. 2 (2007): 121-28.
139
Date 2007Notes/Performers [Argues that by "creating a synthesis between theverbal and the visual" in Prospero's Books (q.v.), Peter Greenawayattempts to resolve the quarrel between Inigo Jones and Ben Jonsonabout the supremacy of the image or the text. Suggests that Greenawaychose Tempest to adapt because of the "way in which it responds to theJonson and Jones debate by exploring the unstable relationship betweenword and spectacle."]
Anderegg, Michael.Title "Greenaway's Baroque Mise en scene at the Imaginative Centre ofShakespeare's The Tempest: A Hypertextual Recapitulation of theRivalry between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones?"Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 101-19.Head Entry aab1481Date 2000Notes/Performers [Describes Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (q.v.)as existing in "an interactive hypermedia environment where the entireimage surface would consist of links capable of taking us not only toother frames/fields of the film itself, but to a whole range ofallusive material therein contained as well." Incorporated withrevisions in Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare (q.v.).]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, PeterDescriptive Terms hypermediaDocument Type ArticleSee Also Anderegg, Cinematic Shakespeare Greenaway, Prospero's BooksGreenaway, Peter.Title "Notes de travail pour Les livres de Prospero."Venue/Publisher Positif 363 (1991): 28-33.Date 1991Notes/Performers [Prints selections from Peter Greenaway's workingnotes for Prospero's Books (q.v.), including an outline of thefundamental ideas informing the film, a synopsis, and comments onShakespeare's Tempest and the decor.]Donaldson, Peter S.Title "Digital Archives and Sibylline Fragments: The Tempest and theEnd of Books."Venue/Publisher Postmodern Culture 8, no. 2 (1998):http://muse.jhu.edu.lp.hscl.ufl.edu/journals/pmc/v008/8.2donaldson.html.Date 1998Notes/Performers [Examines how Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books(q.v.) "reads The Tempest anachronistically, as a play about the endof books and the advent of electronic forms."] Buchanan, Judith.
140
Title "Cantankerous Scholars and the Production of a Canonical Text:The Appropriation of Hieronymite Space in Prospero's Books."Venue/Publisher Stalpaert, Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books [F]: 43-100.Head Entry aab1481Date 2000Notes/Performers [Analyzes the parallels between Prospero's story andthe life of St. Jerome as examples of the intertextual andinterdiscursive relation of Prospero's Books (q.v.) with otherShakespeare films and works of art.]Persons Stalpaert, Christel; Greenaway, Peter; St. Jerome
141